With the help of Bee Nirundonpruk, Catherine Dai, and Arkira Tanglertsumpun, REV has become close partners with White Dove Global Prep, an all-girls STEM and athletics-focused Christian high school in Kigali, Rwanda. To satiate the demand of bright young students in Kigali who couldn’t afford the exorbitant costs of local standardized test tutors, we offered SAT prep over Zoom videoconference, calling it the SATellite program, beginning in March of this year. Our work also includes maintaining their website and providing them internet (we conducted our first handful of classes in the Kigali Marriott conference room).
In May we reported that two months’ prep improved the diagnostic test by > 100 points per student (and September results indicate another 90-point incremental improvement), and it is fantastic to know, empirically, that our endeavors are working.
While the course has become part of the curriculum for the S5 and S6 (Juniors and Seniors) students and all students are boasting competitive scores, I realized when I visited this week that the students are so much more than smart and committed to performing well on a Scantron test. These are future pilots, computer scientists, economists, engineers and poets, with unrivaled ambition and resiliency to the adversity they face on a daily basis. Put simply, these students are leaders.
On Wednesday, I conducted one-on-sessions with the S6 girls who are sitting for the test on October 5, and annotated their specific struggles, but also inquired what their post-secondary ambitions were, what size school they were interested in (liberal arts vs. large state school and everything in between), preferred climate (unsurprisingly there was some aversion to the blustering Midwest and Northeastern winters), intended majors, and any other concerns they might have in the process. It was a fantastic opportunity to get to know the students on a personal basis, and we intend to mentor the students one-on-one throughout their college application process according to our own personalities, insight, and experiences (put another way: I will not be advising the future engineers).
One of the most rewarding experiences was talking through their personality essays. One of the students, Kelly, told me her passion about poetry, and I suggested she work poems into her essay. Another told me about her dream of becoming a pilot, and I suggested referencing her flight to New York in the summer as a concrete example of her interest.
I was lucky enough to have attended a college preparatory high school that did all the stressful college application administrative stuff for us, so I took for granted how complicated the process is, particularly for international students of very limited means. Many of the tasks we had to do (updating College Board profiles, applying for CSS) are ones that I would have considered obvious components of the process, but for many of the students this is so new, exciting, and stressful. However, I know that with their willpower, intellectual curiosity, and diverse/interesting stories, they are setting themselves up for unbridled success in all of their pursuits and the world will be a better place for it.
On Thursday, the S6 class took another SAT practice test, while I met with the S5 students to discuss some tricks and tips to the SAT and got to know all twelve of them better (interests, funny stories, whether they had been outside of Rwanda). It was a lot of fun and allowed me to get a better idea of the people behind the pencils.
After this, I met with Paula and Ornella, two smart, driven S5 students, who had just gotten back from 3+ weeks in Nepal with the Global Girl Project (another partner of mine). The Founder of Global Girl Project, Julia Lynch, met girls from Nepal, Pakistan, and Rwanda, in Kathmandu, Nepal. While there, the girls had leadership classes, learned about their common struggles and cultural differences, and even trekked through the Nepali forest and mountains. After the project, the girls are tasked with implementing a project that has a positive impact in their communities. They reflected on their incredible experiences and what they learned.
One of my activities as a partner of Global Girl Project is to measure and quantify the impacts of their projects, which will not only prove empirically that the projects have a real, tangible impact, but will also help the organization secure funding, as donors increasingly rely on metrics as a barometer for whether they will fund a particular organization.
Paula will be conducting sessions with girls in the Kigali area who are at risk of becoming pregnant or opting into marriage prematurely (often due to peer pressure). We wrote up questionnaires targeted at this population to help maximize the impact of her sessions and decrease the percentage of at-risk teens actually getting pregnant or married.
Ornella aims to increase female representation in IT, and we also wrote a survey to understand why girls in Rwanda (a country that has progressive gender equality) do not pursue coursework or careers in technology. Our goal is to identify whether confidence or other qualitative factors are the culprits for this underrepresentation and frame our sessions with girls based on this discovery.
After my sessions with Paula and Ornella, we played a competitive game of kickball and I’m happy to say my team won 20-17. Overall it was a fantastic experience and I was so glad to meet all the students, as well as the teachers. Patrice Dorrall and Faithful Abaho are the principal administrators at the school and their vision, passion, and competence is unparalleled. I am so excited to continue this relationship and provide advisory to them, especially as they add a primary section in 2020. White Dove Global Prep’s mantra is “Teach. Lead. Dream” and the school does all three of those things splendidly.