Freshman Honor Students Find Missing Challenge

The 15 freshmen in the USC Resident Honors Program agree on one thing: They have finally found the challenge that was missing from their lives in high school.

The six girls and nine boys enrolled in this unusual program--one of only two in the country (the other is at Johns Hopkins University)--have all skipped their senior year of high school and become freshmen on the USC campus. They live in honor dorms and take honors courses that satisfy their high school graduation requirements at the same time as they’re completing their first year of college.

This year’s Resident Honors scholars all come from California and have earned at least a 3.5 grade-point average and a minimum of 1,250 on their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. (Total possible scores are 800 for verbal and 800 for math.) But that’s where the similarities end. They each had different high school experiences and their reasons for choosing the program are as different as their goals.

For Eric Hamilton, 17, high school was like “dying a slow death.” The thought of one more year seemed unbearable to the soft-spoken teen-ager from Arcadia who wants to go into international law. Then his father told him about the Resident Honors Program.

“I’ve never seen Eric move so fast,” his father, Carl, said. “He asked his high school counselor to nominate him, got special permission to take the SAT exam at the last minute and began filling out all the financial and entrance applications.” (Each RHP scholar receives a $3,500 merit scholarship toward the annual $10,000 tuition and additional financial aid is also available.)

Assistant Director Penny Von Helmolt says one of the first indications of whether a student will succeed in the program is how they handle the application procedure.

“When mothers called and said, ‘I have this gifted child who’s bored in high school and needs your program,’ we didn’t take them.

“When the students themselves called and I told them about all the paper work, they’d come back two days later and ask if there was anything else they needed to do. That tips me off that they’re together enough about themselves that they’re going to make it through the program.”

Richard Martin, 16, didn’t hear about the program until two weeks before the fall semester started but he knew he had to try for it. He has also applied to the U.S. Air Force Academy and says if he doesn’t get a congressional nomination there, he will continue at USC in ROTC.

“At my high school no one knew anything about computers,” says the tall blond aerospace major from Lindsay, Calif. “The most popular thing to do there is drink beer and party. Here (in the dorms) people talk about computers and I get excited because people have high ambitions.

“When I first got here, I worried about the workload so much I couldn’t concentrate. Then I decided to use all that negative energy to figure out what I needed to do and just manage my time better.”

Martin seems to be managing quite well. He begins each day with a two-hour swim and plans to try out for the water polo team next semester.

“The students do have a difficult transition to make when they come here,” program director Dr. Karen Segal agrees. “They’re away from home for the first time and they’re put into an intense learning environment. We have to be very careful that we’re taking people who are more mature than most students at that age and that we’re giving them enough support so that they feel they can come here with any problem and they’ll get help.”

Von Helmolt, who describes herself as their surrogate mother, provides emotional support and advises the 15 students on living problems. They also have a mentor, Joseph Nyomarkay, who encourages them to develop outside intellectual interests.

“I was asked to be sort of a father figure to them because they’re young and they might feel lost here,” explained Nyomarkay, who has been teaching political science at USC for 25 years. “But they’re not lost. They’re just as at home as the freshmen and sophomores on campus.”

Instead, Nyomarkay provides them with special weekly seminars on subjects the students have requested: religion, the relationship between math and music, Central-American relations and the black movement in America.

Sixteen-year-old Caralee Mahlab from San Jose loved high school. She was active in school clubs and planned to take special courses at nearby San Jose State University during her senior year.

“I’d never thought of coming to USC. What was USC? I had no idea. I’d planned to be a math major at the University of California at Berkeley. Then I heard about RHP in my honors English class and decided to apply.

“My only disappointment when I got here was learning that USC doesn’t have a math club,” explained Mahlab, who plans to teach high school math. “I had to give up about six clubs in high school when I left but it was worth it.

“When I went back to visit my friends last month, they were all complaining about how senior year is supposed to be so much fun only they weren’t having any fun. I’m having more fun than I ever did in the whole three years I went to high school!

“I was a little scared when I first got here and found out how much writing there was, because writing has always given me the biggest headaches. I wasn’t sure I was ready to conquer that but I decided I didn’t want to be just one-sided in math and science. This program will push me even further and I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that at any other university.”

Apparently Mahlab has overcome her struggle with writing enough to take on another challenge besides her course work. She also writes features for USC’s Daily Trojan, the campus newspaper.

The freshmen take two semesters of writing tutorials and two core courses concerned with ethical issues--”Quality of Life,” which surveys literature from biblical times to the present, and “Change and the Future,” which deals with the nature of social change in society. The emphasis is on writing, and along with each class there’s a writing tutorial as well as individual tutorials.

“Writing classes are the most successful part of our program,” explains Von Helmolt. “We expect that 90% of our students will go on to earn advanced degrees and unless they can write, they won’t make it. In many colleges if you demonstrate a certain competence in writing, you can be exempted from the requirement. Our philosophy is the exact opposite. We never say that people write well enough. We always push them to another level because writing skills are the basis of all knowledge.

“These students come in able to do things but they’ve never been challenged hard enough. What’s wonderful about them is that they can handle being taught rapidly--you teach them something once and they’ve got it. Eighty percent of them started out as weak writers but after being ‘traumatized’ for six weeks in intensive writing tutorials, they show instant grasp. We give them personalized attention and they soar.”

Dawn Howard, a psychology major from Woodside, felt that high school was stifling. She applied to the program after learning about it from her older brother, Daniel, a sophomore at USC.

“Now I have the freedom to do what I want and learn who I am,” says Howard, 16, who also participates in the USC Dance Theater company.

“I don’t think grades matter that much because I know when I’ve done good work and when I haven’t. I don’t consider myself smart--in fact my SAT scores were below the requirement--but I explained in my admission application that my scores can’t reflect my ability to follow through and complete whatever is given to me. I believe if you want to do it, you can. Besides, here they teach you everything you need to know--that’s what college is all about!”

“The workload is immense,” says Holly Wyatt, 17, an international relations major from San Clemente. “Between 60 to 70 hours a week depending on whether we have a paper due. But there’s a strong support system and we’re all very close to our teachers, so if we have any problems, they don’t leave us stranded. We have a community, a family within the university.”

The program also creates a social community for the students with special evening seminars, film festivals, dinners and weekend retreats.

Wyatt has applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and if her proposal is accepted, hopes to spend nine weeks next summer at Columbia University, studying the similarities between the American Civil War and the Italian Unification.

The 15 students do have one other common goal despite their many differences, Eric Hamilton says: to do well in the program and to get something more out of college than just a general education.