The sky’s no limit

Chris CORDOVA grew up in Watts, the daughter of a widowed seamstress from El Salvador. Her late father, she was told, had a gift for mathematics. She was in middle school when a teacher insisted she try algebra a year early, then geometry, then math analysis because “I already knew everything they were talking about and I had started correcting the teacher.”

By the end of her sophomore year, she had taken every math course available at King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science. By her junior year she had taught herself AP calculus.

It was a flier passed along last year by one of her guidance counselors, however, that made her see -- really see -- the possibilities in what she tended to view as just sort of a knack.

“It was this summer program called COSMOS,” she remembered. It allowed her to spend a month with tenured UC faculty, learning science and mathematics. While her friends back home were sleeping late, she was at UC Santa Cruz researching the properties of batrachotoxin, the compound secreted by poison dart frogs.

She hung out with astronomers and attended lectures on Big Bang theory. When she got home, her group was invited to a dinner at the Getty Center in honor of the year’s Nobel laureates, hosted by the consul general of Sweden. She sat with some of the world’s most renowned minds, her mom wrapped in a shawl and beaming beside her.

“My dream now is to work for NASA,” said the 17-year-old high school senior. “I think I want to be an astrophysicist.”

As the debate rages this month at Harvard University and elsewhere over how to get smart girls like Cordova -- and smart boys, for that matter -- into careers in math and science, fresh attention is being paid to an old standby: science camp.

Defying their stereotype as pencil-necked-nerd fests, summer programs in science and math are surging as college admissions have become more competitive and public schools have cut programs for gifted kids. Some aim to make science and math hip by targeting kids before peer pressure teaches them that brains are uncool; some have stirred controversy by targeting the best and brightest -- as opposed to the most needy -- and giving them even more motivation.

* The Sally Ride Science Camp for middle school girls is expanding after two years of capacity enrollment on the Stanford University campus. This year it will be held at four locations (Stanford University, the University of San Diego, UC Berkeley and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga.), with room for more than 1,000 kids.

* At Johns Hopkins University’s 25-year-old Center for Talented Youth in Maryland, the granddaddy of camps for gifted children, demand for summer science and math programs has run so high in the past several years that the center has evolved a bevy of specialized spinoff courses in such subjects as genomics and neuroscience.

* COSMOS, more formally known as the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, has, in just five years, become one of the West Coast’s more sought-after high school enrichment programs. Championed by Gayle Wilson, the former California first lady and Westinghouse scholar, and administered by the University of California, it was founded in 2000 as the tech boom was stalling and concern over the competitiveness of the U.S. labor force was rising. It has since served 1,930 eighth- to 12th-graders and expanded to four UC campuses.

Now, as its first campers progress through college, educators are tracking the program to see what impact, if any, it has had in turning today’s whiz kids into tomorrow’s mathematicians, doctors, astronomers, biomedical researchers and engineers. So far, the news is promising.

Life-changing experience

In questionnaires, a majority of COSMOS participants and alumnae say they plan to pursue careers in math or science. Enrollment among black and Latino students is still low -- 32.6% of last year’s participants were white and 38.4% were Asian, compared with 16.5% Latino and 4.8% black (the remainder declined to state or listed themselves as “other”) -- but 52% of the participants so far have been female. And students of both genders say their science camp experience was life-changing.

“I was going to be a lawyer,” said Jamaal Sanders, one of the first COSMOS campers, who applied on a whim in 2000 after torn ligaments sidelined him from his soccer team in Pomona. At the time, he said, he just thought of himself as a bright kid who “liked solving problems and liked taking things apart and putting them together.” Now he’s at UC Irvine, studying to be a mechanical engineer.

Matthew Fraser, executive director of Berkeley-based Education Unlimited, which works with academic summer programs such as the Sally Ride camp, says science camps have fallen in and out of favor over the years. In the 1990s, for example, computer camps were a burgeoning business, but demand plummeted as schools became better at teaching computer literacy in the classroom and the dot-com crash made the Internet seem less glamorous.

Space Camp, the popular sleep-away program for budding astronauts that has been run for 23 years out of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., suffered a devastating drop in enrollment after 9/11 because so few parents were willing to let their children fly unaccompanied to or from some far-off location. The camp eventually had to shut down its satellite sites in Florida and California.

Now, Fraser said, demand is reflecting a broader concern about economic competitiveness, both at a civic level and among parents whose children will soon vie for jobs with Indian engineers and Chinese mathematicians.

“They see graduate programs where the majority of people at the toughest levels are often foreign students who were prepared outside the U.S. school system,” said Fraser. “They see the best-qualified science teachers being lured away by higher-paying math and science jobs in the private sector.”

The strategy at the $1,250-to-$1,695-a-week Sally Ride camp -- founded by the former astronaut, whose private company now specializes in science education programming -- is to reach out to girls in sixth through ninth grade, when their natural interest in science is often superseded by peer pressure.

COSMOS and the Johns Hopkins programs, meanwhile, focus on encouraging kids who have already distinguished themselves as high achievers; the Hopkins program, in fact, is limited to children who score above a certain level on a battery of tests. COSMOS kids apply to themed “course clusters” (robotics, astronomy, environmental science, etc.) and are screened by committees who look at grades, teacher recommendations and other criteria.

It’s a controversial approach -- at least for COSMOS, because that program is partially state funded. (The state’s share of funding has fallen this year, in fact, forcing the program -- which expanded this year to UC San Diego along with sites at UC Irvine, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz -- to rely on corporate and private donations.)

If many COSMOS participants come from working- and middle-class backgrounds, many also come from highly educated and affluent families. About a third of the participants received financial aid last year because the $1,273 tuition was a burden, but an equal proportion came from families in which the parents had master’s degrees or doctorates. Fifteen percent of last year’s in-state participants came from private schools.

Some critics of programs like COSMOS believe public resources should be concentrated on leveling the playing field for the mainstream, not helping top students get further ahead. But the tack is vigorously defended by the program’s backers, who point out that gifted children often get short shrift in classrooms regardless of socioeconomic status, and that the wealthier students help subsidize those who can’t pay.

“At any public or private school, these students might not get as much time and attention because people say, ‘Well, they’re going to make it anyway,’ ” said Irene Bronston, who administers COSMOS from the UC president’s office.

“Any mathematician or scientist will tell you that there was a turning point in their childhood that told them, ‘Wow -- this is what I want to do,’ ” said Susan Hackwood, executive director of the California Council on Science and Technology and a UC Riverside professor of electrical engineering. “COSMOS has the ability to transform students who often haven’t traditionally had access to that ‘wow’ sort of science.”

A playful program

That “wow” factor is a common theme on the science camp scene.

“It wasn’t like spending the summer getting ahead in calculus -- it was more like enrichment,” said Ari Berlin, the 17-year-old son of a single mother in Saugus who attended the UC Davis COSMOS last year with the help of a scholarship. Berlin, whose extracurricular activities include being captain of his high school tennis team and having a part-time job doing calculations on Jupiter’s magnetic field for a Caltech professor, said he was struck by the playfulness of the program.

“We created images with fractals, which was very cool. We did coding theory like they did in World War II. We built rockets and had a competition off the top of a building to see who could engineer their plane to fly the farthest. Of course, mine went straight down to the ground, but that’s OK.”

Most of the camps also emphasize social immersion. Tweeners and young teens at the Sally Ride camps, for example, can take advantage of a commuter option or bunk on-site for a week to 10 days. Aaron Jackson, a senior at the California Academy of Math and Science in southwest Los Angeles who studied solar phenomena for four weeks at the UC Irvine COSMOS, said he and his roommate, a budding environmental scientist from the Central Valley, still keep in touch: “Fresno wasn’t as different as I thought it would be.”

For Cordova, much of the enrichment was in seeing the world beyond Watts and learning that she wasn’t alone and needn’t feel intimidated.

“The people were so smart,” she said, “I felt at first like maybe I couldn’t live up to them. It had been two years since I had taken chemistry, for example, and the teacher would point me out and I would be lost, trying to remember. I know the stereotypes people have of minorities, or just inner-city youth. I wanted them to think I was just like them.”

Her salvation, she said, was a resident assistant from urban North Long Beach who had attended the program, then gone on to enroll at UC Santa Cruz.

“Even with her ghetto grammar,” Cordova remembered, laughing, “she was really inspiring. She’d tell me her experiences and what she went through as the first in her family to go to college.”

One day, she said, “I just sat down with my group and we started having this conversation about calculus and limits. There was a kid there from Alhambra, and a kid from Malibu, and I didn’t realize until afterward that I had just sat down and done this. It was, like, we’re not all that different. We can all do what we set our minds to do.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Where, how long, how much

Here’s a brief guide to California science camps. Note that the deadlines for applying to two of them are quickly approaching. For more information on the camps, please consult their websites.

* COSMOS (California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science): Monthlong summer program for students in grades eight through 12 with a proven aptitude for and interest in math and science. Application based on teacher letters of recommendation, student essay, grade point average, science or math projects, community service. California locations at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis. Tuition: $1,273 plus $20 application deposit. Scholarships and financial aid available. Application deadline March 15. www.ucop.edu/cosmos.

* Sally Ride Science Camp: Weeklong to 10-day science enrichment for middle-school girls. Sleep-away camp and day camp options available. California locations at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of San Diego. Tuition: $1,285 to $1,695 depending on age group and location. Application deposit: $325. Financial aid available. Applications taken on a first come, first served basis. www.sallyridecamps.com.

* Education Unlimited Camps: Summer academic camps for middle school and high school students in college preparation, science, computers, law, debate and theater arts. California locations at UCLA, University of San Diego, UC Berkeley and Menlo College, but not all locations offer all camps. Tuition: $1,100 to $5,970 for camps of varying duration. Applications taken on a first come, first served basis. www.educationunlimited.com.

* Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth: Three-week summer academic program for gifted children in grades two and up. Applicants must score higher than a designated level on a variety of tests, including the SAT1 for grades seven and above. California locations at Loyola Marymount University, California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and the Windward School in West Los Angeles. Tuition: $1,280 for day programs to $2,750 for residential programs. Application fee: $42. Application deadline: April 2. www.jhu.edu/gifted.