Science posse, from left to right: Nana Owusu-Sarpong, Angel Garcia, Gloriya Nedler, Rebekah Lafontant, Virginia Ramos, Usman Hameedi, Yvonne Perez, Andy Sanchez, Emmanuel Obasuyi, Janaki Patel.

When Dang finishes talking, the young men and women clump together and talk—about their dorm assignments and class schedules for the fall and how they spent the previous night. They laugh and gossip like old friends.

In fact, the group of high-achieving students from New York City has been deliberately matched up—with each other and with Brandeis—by the Posse Foundation, and they're spending two weeks of their summer at Brandeis for a “boot camp” designed to prepare them for the rigors of college science. They first met 7 months earlier.

The Posse Foundation has been establishing such groups for two decades—but this year's posse at Brandeis is the first to focus on science.

		Student Voices Hear Brandeis students and faculty reflect on the Posse program. (mp3, running time: 9.47)

Shortly after his acceptance into the science posse, Usman Hameedi, who graduated from Benjamin Banneker Academy, a public school in Brooklyn, voiced high hopes for the program.

“I think it's going to be really beneficial to have good friends going into college,” he said. “We're probably going to be the 10 nerds sitting in the library studying together all the time, but at least we won't be 10 nerds studying alone.”

Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation (a Brandeis alum and 2007 MacArthur Fellow) launched the first posse in 1989 after counseling a student unable to finish college. “He said something that struck me,” says Bial. “He said he never would have dropped out of college if he'd had his posse with him.”

The Posse Foundation has helped more than 2,600 talented urban high school students through college by sending them to schools in groups of 10 to navigate the highs and lows of college life together. In 2008, the Foundation sent students from 6 cities to 33 top-tier schools across the country.

“It started with the idea of a support group, but it has become much more than that,” Bial says. “It's also a leadership program, a diversity program, and a program that has transformative powers—both on college campuses and in the workforce.” And though each posse is drawn from public high schools in select cities, applicants are not limited by race or gender. They're judged by motivation, academic achievement, and leadership. “Posse is not a minority program,” she says, “it's a diversity program. You can see every kind of kid in posse, every race, every religion.”

Unlike posses of the past, the 10 students gathered at the Brandeis summer boot camp share one additional quality: a love of science.

HHMI professor Irving Epstein received a $1 million grant from HHMI in 2006 for his plan to mesh the posse model with science education, but he was already an involved participant in the Brandeis posses. Epstein was Provost of Brandeis when Bial first approached him in 1996 about Brandeis joining the posse network, and he lobbied hard for the program. The Posse Foundation has since sent 11 traditional posses to Brandeis, but Epstein was concerned that the program produced very few science graduates.

“In a typical year, there are one, two, three, maybe even as many as four incoming students in the posse who express some interest in science,” he says. By graduation, that number is typically down to zero. “Once every other year someone might graduate with a degree in the natural sciences,” he says. Epstein saw room for improvement. In fact, he thought posses would be the perfect way to help students through the challenges of science.

Photo: Jörg Meyer

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