Three USC students get taste of college life at CMU program
From left, Upper St. Clair High School students Spencer Miller, Kevin Chen and Sahil Doshi were three of 58 students who attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences.
Spencer Miller
Kevin Chen
Sahil Doshi
Three Upper St. Clair High School students were selected to participate in a five-week STEM program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Spencer Miller, Kevin Chen and Sahil Doshi were three of 58 students who attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences. The selection process is competitive, with 423 total applications this year. USC was one of two schools to have three students at PGSS.
The five-week program for rising high school seniors started in the first week of July and was for students with an interest in science, math and technology to encourage them to pursue those careers.
Students live in the dorms at CMU, taking seven hours of STEM classes a day, all of which are taught by CMU professors, teacher assistants or other experts in the field. Along with the rigorous classes, which range from biology to computer science to math and everything in between, the students also worked three hours a day – or more – on separate group projects. At night, they’d do homework and hang out in the dorms with each other.
All three students said the program prepared them for what life in college will be like.
“(PGSS) really told you a lot about what college is going to be like and, more accurately, what college can be like,” Miller said. “It was very promising. It made college look like something that can really be enjoyed. It takes a little bit of the stress moving forward off.”
Chen said one of the best aspects of PGSS is the relationships you make with the other students from across the state.
“What’s really nice about this program since it’s been going on for so long and the actual program is five weeks you really get to experience what it’s like to be a college student,” Chen said. “The very first stay when your parents drop you off you’re pushed into an environment where you’re sort of forced to interact with people. A big part of PGSS is making new friends and meeting new people and understanding their perspectives.”
Doshi said while the classes were obviously more rigorous than high school classes, it was a “relaxed version of college” because there weren’t grades. That doesn’t mean the students slacked off in class, though. Much the opposite, Doshi said, as every student was driven by his or her interest in STEM fields.
The classes involved topics like special relativity, organic chemistry, discrete mathematics, laser technology, neurobiology and other mind-numbing topics. Doshi said the homework was so difficult at times that students had no choice other than to work together.
“That’s one of the hallmarks of the program, is they really want to encourage collaboration when it comes to learning. In each of the classes, I ended up working with other people, something that I think a lot of people in this program were not used to,” Doshi said. “At our own high school’s we’re used to working on our own and being self-sufficient. When it came to these concepts, they’re so challenging – one of the topics was special relativity, which is a topic that none of us have ever touched. Being able to work through the concepts there really took collaboration.”
The group projects, with a presentation at the end of the program, promoted teamwork too, and Miller said his group project – and the people he worked with – was the highlight of the program for him.
“Upper St. Clair has a lot of kids who are very interested in these subjects, (but) it’s really difficult to find such a large group of kids with such focused interests,” Miller said. “It was really great to get along with them, because that’s not something that’s easy to find elsewhere.”
Miller’s team worked on creating a computer program that extracted info from a court records website and conducted analysis on it. Chen and Doshi were in the same group, which developed an intelligence robot for the game StarCraft.
Considering all of the students were from Pennsylvania, Doshi said he was surprised by the amount of diversity.
” I think the really cool part about the whole experience and meeting the other people is you meet people from a bunch of different backgrounds,” Doshi said. “Initially, I thought that within Pennsylvania there can’t be that many different type of people who have that many different type of experiences. But I was definitely proven wrong.”
All three students are excited to pursue STEM related majors in college, especially after attending PGSS.
For Miller, he would highly recommend any student interested in the STEM fields to apply for PGSS in future years.
“It was probably the greatest month of my life,” he said.