Feature: Thinking Outside the Classroom
The Applied Science & Engineering Program not only places students in some of the country’s leading labs, it also allows them to take ownership of their education.
Ian Aldrich
By her own admission, Michaela Purvis ’20 didn’t pack any particular fondness for science as a middle school student. But then, she landed at St. Paul’s and, during a Fourth Form chemistry class, a whole new world opened up to her. Actually, worlds within worlds. The more the Amherst, N.H., native dove into all the small-chain connections that define life at the molecular level, the deeper she wanted to go. “Everything just sort of clicked,” Purvis says. “I understood the concepts. Things made sense to me. It was all kind of amazing, how things could exist and interact at such a small level.” She took a biology class over the summer. The following autumn, Purvis had her eyes set on one of the most distinct curriculums offered by any preparatory school in the country, the Applied Science & Engineering Program (ASEP) at SPS.
Through ASEP, selected students are engaged in a project-based, individual-learning STEM curriculum that prepares them for the world’s leading science programs. The centerpiece of the experience is a summer externship after their Fifth Form year that students use to study a vast array of interests, including engineering, astronomy, computer science, and biology. It can be rigorous, demanding work that requires an extensive amount of pre-externship training and study. But it also places the program, and what the students get out of it, in the hands of each of the participants. The students drive the process and how it’s shaped.
ASEP student Harrison Sweet ’20 learns how to use the School’s new qPCR machine with program director Sarah Boylan.
“A lot of times in a classical education model, you go to class, your teacher teaches you, you learn something and you have a test a week later,” says ASEP Director Sarah Boylan, who also teaches chemistry and biology at SPS. “And a lot of the material the kids learn from is supplied by the teacher and that’s what they are tested on. But the ASEP kids are driving their own independent research that is specific to them. They’re becoming the experts and we’re here to help them along the way.” Only 12 students are accepted into ASEP each year and the independence it engenders begins at the get-go. Over the fall and winter, Fifth Formers attend regular planning meetings held by program faculty. Students research the labs where they want to obtain externships, then, after some coaching by academic mentors, independently query the heads of those labs about possible summer employment. During Fifth Form spring, ASEP students replace one of their courses with a seminar to prepare for their externships. It may allow them to learn a programming language, master relevant biological techniques, or complete an engineering project. The goal is for the students to pack in as much preparation as possible so that, on day one of their externship, they can hit the ground running.
“We don’t want our kids to be babied and hand-held,” says Boylan. “We want the labs to actually trust them with their work.” Over the last several years, students have participated in a range of research projects, from analyzing plant growth at the MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative to working with researchers at the Harvard School of Dental Health to analyze proteins as a way of forming a better understanding of musculoskeletal tissues to studying yeast models at Stanford University for greater insight into issues around ALS and dementia. Following the externship, students present their summer work to the School community and carry out a capstone project that continues their research. For Purvis, the ASEP program brought her to Baltimore, Md., to study cell biology and embryonic development at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine – and that meant a lot of firsts. She moved to a new city, lived on her own, and adjusted to the demands of not just working in a lab largely populated with post-doctoral students, but also the rigors of a nine-to-five work week.
“I was obviously nervous at the beginning,” says Purvis, whose externship ran 10 weeks. “Here I am, this little high schooler, with all these other people with so much experience. But St. Paul’s did a great job of helping me prepare beforehand. I picked up things fairly quickly and, by the second or third week, I felt like I belonged.”
Liam Pharr ’20 works with triple negative breast cancer cells in the Lindsay Center’s cell culture room.
A Program Rooted in Tradition
The ASEP launched with the first crop of externships in the summer of 2015. But the roots of the program go back further than that. In 2010, just two years before the School opened its doors to the new $44 million, 78,000-square-foot Lindsay Center for Mathematics and Science, Doug Schloss ’77, then head of the SPS Board of Trustees, and Jim Kinnear ’46, the body’s former chair, were working with engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence teacher Terry Wardrop ’73, to bolster the School’s STEM programs through significant donations. “I believe a major reason I was able to have such a free reign in designing such an ambitious and successful engineering lab space for the Lindsay Center was due to their support,” says Wardrop, who has taught at SPS since 1983.
Over the previous several years, Wardrop had leveraged his own connections to MIT’s Network of Educators in Science & Technology (NEST) to place SPS students for summer lab research internships. Schloss, in particular, believed the program could be expanded, and in early 2012 he worked closely with Wardrop and fellow teachers Rick Pacelli, Joe Holland, and, later, Will Renauld, to outline a new externship-centric program for St. Paul’s. For the next two years, the team developed the materials and courses to flesh out the program and, during the 2014-15 academic year, the newly christened Engineering Honors Program initiative welcomed its first 10 students. In 2018, SPS renamed it the Applied Science & Engineering Program to reflect its broadening focus.
The program’s impact on the SPS community has been immeasurable. Among the School’s newest alumni, it has changed not just how they see their futures but also how they see themselves. “This experience is one of my fondest memories and certainly informed many of my interests today,” says Sophie Pesek ’16, now a senior at Harvard, where she’s studying environmental science and engineering. For her ASEP externship, she worked at the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Mass. “I loved seeing the way science and the study of the natural world could impact human and ecosystem health. It was valuable in teaching me how important engineering the right tools can be in solving any given problem. It also exposed me to a nurturing environment of researchers who were constantly exploring, giving talks, and encouraging me to ask novel questions, all while solving problems through engineering.”
Since graduating SPS, Pesek has continued asking important questions with a curiosity that has taken her around the world. She has worked on heat pump technology in China, monitored coastal erosion and fisheries in the small South African country of Suriname, and helped out at a waste treatment facility in Ghana. “I am incredibly grateful for the strong foundation the [ASEP] program has given me,” she says.
Michaela Purvis ’20, who externed at Johns Hopkins Medical School, engages with other students about her experience.
Brian O’Sullivan ’16 is another product of the ASEP. A senior at Columbia University, where he is studying mathematics-statistics and sociology, O’Sullivan worked at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) for his ASEP externship, which he credits as completely changing his career ambitions. “Prior to the externship, I had never really heard of data analysis and had not done any work in the area,” says O’Sullivan. “Over the course of that summer, I learned just how tangible and exciting data analysis can be in relation to the real world.” Since his externship, the ambitious O’Sullivan has launched a company with a fellow SPS alum called Fanalytical Solutions, which uses data analysis to help sports franchises better understand their attendance and revenue. In the summer of 2017, following his first year at Columbia, he returned to CTL to expand his analytical skills and today he serves as the president of the Columbia Data Science Society, which works to show the school community how versatile data science can be. “Though I did not know what I wanted to study in college when I started at SPS, [ASEP], especially through the guidance of Mr. Wardrop and Mr. Renauld, helped me to see how data can be used to make more informed decisions and that my true passion lies within data analysis,” says O’Sullivan.
The Arc of the Experience
Sarah Boylan, ASEP’s director, says the journey of each student is chronicled in the journals they must keep during their externships. Often, those journals follow a familiar path. “So many times, it starts out with that first week and they are feeling terrified,” says Boylan. “By the middle of the externship, they’ve settled in, they feel like they’re learning a lot, and they love all the independence they’ve been given. And at the end, they’re lamenting the fact that they’re leaving, that it’s been an incredible experience, and they don’t want it to end.”
The power of the ASEP lies in the clarity it gives students. Many find that the summer experience confirms their passions for a certain topic or career choice. But, for a few others, it can demonstrate that maybe they want to pursue something different for their life. And that’s no small thing either. “Some do come back and say, ‘I never want to do that,’” says Boylan. “That’s important. At least they’re getting that experience when they’re 18, not say, when they’re 25 and it’s harder to turn back.”
Sophie Pesek ’16, now a senior at Harvard, did her ASEP externship in the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
By the time Michaela Purvis is 25 years old, she’ll most likely be well on her way to earning a doctorate in biology, or maybe she’ll be entrenched in medical school. Like Pesek and O’Sullivan before her, she says she’ll certainly have ASEP to thank for helping orient her toward something she believes will be meaningful and rewarding. “It was a game changer for me,” she says. “Not just working at Johns Hopkins but also living down there on my own. I came away feeling a lot more confident about myself. I couldn’t have imagined doing this in Third Form. I can be a careful person. I haven’t taken a lot of risks. This was one of those risks.” To any other students considering the program, Purvis says they shouldn’t think twice about it. “If you put in the effort, you’re going to get so much out of it,” she says. “The amount of knowledge you can amass, about yourself and what you’re learning in just one summer is crazy.”