Scholars set out to change the world
to learn new words. He interned at the National Cancer Institute at 16 years old. He played football and ran track. He took AP calculus, physics and chemistry.
That profile raises a question: Wouldn’t he have done as well elsewhere? How much of the Meyerhoffs’ success can be attributed to the program?
Professor Kenneth Maton has studied the Meyerhoff scholars since 1990.
He has collected data not only on the Meyerhoffs, but also on their similarly credentialed peers who were accepted into the program, but chose to go elsewhere.
Maton has found that African-American Meyerhoffs are more than twice as likely to earn their bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields than those who turned the program down, and more than five times as likely to get higher degrees in STEM.
All the students who were offered admission were capable. But the Meyerhoffs were far more likely to emerge as scientists.
Naomi Mburu is perhaps Mount Hebron High School’s most illustrious alumna: She was named a Rhodes scholar, UMBC’s first, in November.
Adrian Davey volunteers at the school as a peer mentor and an SAT prep tutor.
Now they sat onstage in the school auditorium, speaking to students for Black History Month.
Davey told the audience he would graduate magna cum laude in May with a degree in chemical engineering. The room erupted in applause.
He spoke of the courses he took in high school that helped him prepare for college — Algebra II, AP Physics — but added that it’s OK if they hadn’t yet taken those classes.
“The people who are successful are those who work hard,” he said. “Raw intellect will get you nowhere, I promise you . ... It’s about discipline, passion and your drive.” Then it was Mburu’s turn. She asked the members of the audience to close their eyes.
“If you could do anything, regardless of what you are doing now, in 10 years, what would you be doing?” She paused. “For some people, that is very clear. For others, including me, it’s not clear,” she said.
“That’s OK, but either way, you have to have some kind of goal.”
In high school, she said, “I took opportunities and applied for things where chances of failure were fairly high, and I did fail many times. But the fact that I had these goals helped to get me where I am now.”
The Meyerhoffs’ mentorship and service requirements reflect the philosophy of W.E.B Du Bois.
Du Bois, one of Hrabowski’s heroes, believed that high achievers would inspire others.
“The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up,” he wrote in 1903. Hrabowski says he believes each Meyerhoff will reach and inspire 1,000 people over their lifetimes. Fedinick arrived at Berkeley in 2000 to begin her graduate studies, she felt like a unicorn.
She would go weeks without seeing another black person, she says, much less a black woman STEM Ph.D. candidate.
“In fairness,” she says, “I was in the lab all the time, and I also didn’t see the ocean next door.”
One day at a seminar in Utah a few years into her program, the professor organizing the talks mistook her for the projectionist — even though she was wearing a suit and sitting with the other presenters. The actual projectionist ignored her while asking other students about their presentation times.
“After the session, I went to the lobby and cried,” she says. “It was heartbreaking.”
She wrote Summers, her mentor at UMBC, saying it was one of her worst days since leaving.
Being a unicorn is tiring, Fedinick says, and those low points have made her question whether the work is worth the trouble.
After Berkeley, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health.
She is now the director of science and data at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Ultimately, she says, she hopes she’s helping people understand that “science comes in all races.”
She has drawn strength over the years remembering Hrabowski’s pep talks, and advises graduating seniors to do the same.
“That will hold you through tribulation,” say says. “It is about more than the science.
“It’s about changing the landscape and color through which people see science.”