If Magdalena Arias and Ian Sills are any indication of the caliber of San Benito High School students who are taking part in the Ivy League Project, then Hollister may one day become known as a wellspring of scholastic aptitude for the nation.
Sills and Arias are among a group of 27 students who made the cut from an initial 150 that applied and interviewed for the Ivy League Project, which will give them the opportunity to visit 10 Eastern colleges in June. For two young students at the gateway of their academic and professional careers, each appears to not only know what coursework they want to undertake, but the colleges they hope to attend, and their ultimate goals.
Arias said she plans to double-major in electrical engineering and applied mathematics at MIT, Princeton or Caltech (not an Ivy League college, but because of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory there), and has a desire to be a flight controller for NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Sills said he has an interest in politics and has chosen to study law. His dream school is Stanford, but as backups, he is considering Columbia and Harvard.
This is the first year that the Ivy League Project (ILP) has been offered at SBHS. According to ILP’s website, Martin Mares, a 30-year educator, founded it in 1992 to encourage economically-disadvantaged students to apply to some of the most prestigious universities in the nation. The program selects the most talented and promising 10th- and 11th-grade students and takes them to visit Ivy League schools and others, including Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Yale University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Colby College and Columbia University.
Claire Grissom, an assistant principal at SBHS who oversees counseling, said a team of counselors and teachers works on the Ivy League Project, which is geared toward students with a 3.75 or above grade point average because they are considered “prime targets” for going to college. She said the students attend Saturday sessions built around “soft skills,” such as how to deliver a speech, how to greet someone, or sit through an interview.
“It’s giving those students those soft skills while building their portfolio, which includes a cover letter, resume, and letters of reference,” Grissom said. “In the second week of June, we will take them back east to visit approximately 10 schools,” including the Ivy Leagues.
Grissom said the program came to the attention of district Superintendent John Perales while he was going through his doctoral program, after which he passed the information to the counselors. She said the former Parlier (Central Valley) educator, Martin Mares, started the nonprofit project at his school.
Mares comes to the school to teach students the soft skills. Mares also invites students who have successfully gone through his program and have graduated from college to speak to the high school students. The cost for the sessions and the trip to the colleges is $2,250 per student.
“Part of the Saturday session, from 9 a.m. to noon, is talking about how they are going to raise the funds in order to get the cost down as low as possible,” Grissom said, adding that before considering the project for SBHS students, a thorough background check was conducted, including calling other schools that have adopted it. It was decided that the project was a good fit for the high school.
Mares told BenitoLink that the Ivy League Project came about almost by happenstance. He said he had been teaching for three years and was involved in youth conferences. One day, one of his monitors said there was a young man who had just graduated from Harvard, and the monitor thought he would be a good speaker for the conference. The Harvard grad ended up being the keynote speaker. Afterward, he suggested that Mares arrange to take the students to Harvard.
“That was a pretty radical idea,” Mares said. “We took six kids. They had an application process. Three years later, I got three kids into Yale and Brown. The following year, I had two to Princeton and two to Brown. My fifth year, I had my first students accepted to Harvard and MIT. Other kids from other schools started asking if they could join us. I got permission from my superintendent and he allowed me to take kids from other high schools.”
So far, he said, the Ivy League Project has placed 280 students in East Coast colleges. However, he did say that more than 1,500 students opted instead to go to California colleges. The nonprofit, which is under the auspices of the Youth Leaders Education Foundation in Bakersfield, has grown with 18 branches or chapters in California, Arizona and Texas. They are, essentially, franchises, but he does not receive any fees. Instead, he is paid for the sessions and arranging the trip. He said that up until just recently, he had not been able to do the job full-time, but since he retired, the project has expanded quickly.
“When we go to a school, we tell the students they can go to any college, but I found there’s a niche and a lot of kids want to go to East Coast colleges,” Mares said. “So, I’ve been able to fill that niche. I had no idea that it was going to turn into such a big deal.”
He originally called the program the Harvard Tomorrow Project.
“At Yale, the admissions officer told me they didn’t like Harvard,” Mares said. “I thought she was joking with me, but she said if I wanted to stay in their housing I needed to change the name because they were all about Yale. So we changed it to the Ivy League Project.”
Mares said the project has a number of objectives.
“We teach them how to network effectively,” he said. “We teach students about their oral communication skills. We have a lot of team building activities. The third goal is to teach them to focus on the admissions process. We talk about financial aid, the personal statement, letters of recommendations.”
Sills and Arias have attended each Saturday session in order to learn the soft skills and both said they are looking forward to the trip to the colleges.
“Mr. Mares has been teaching us the soft skills,” Arias said, “which is eye contact, a good handshake, pretty much presenting yourself.”
Sills said being able to interact with people and working and collaborating with groups were also taught at the Saturday sessions.
“It was definitely worth the time and effort,” he said, adding that he felt he was fortunate to be included in the group because, “I’ve always been interested in my academic pursuits and always try to finish everything I do through 100 percent effort.”