Chris CORDOVA grew up in Watts, the daughter of a widowed seamstress from El Salvador. Her late father, she was told, had a gift for mathematics. She was in middle school when a teacher insisted she try algebra a year early, then geometry, then math analysis because "I already knew everything they were talking about and I had started correcting the teacher."
By the end of her sophomore year, she had taken every math course available at King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science. By her junior year she had taught herself AP calculus.
It was a flier passed along last year by one of her guidance counselors, however, that made her see -- really see -- the possibilities in what she tended to view as just sort of a knack.
"It was this summer program called COSMOS," she remembered. It allowed her to spend a month with tenured UC faculty, learning science and mathematics. While her friends back home were sleeping late, she was at UC Santa Cruz researching the properties of batrachotoxin, the compound secreted by poison dart frogs.
She hung out with astronomers and attended lectures on Big Bang theory. When she got home, her group was invited to a dinner at the Getty Center in honor of the year's Nobel laureates, hosted by the consul general of Sweden. She sat with some of the world's most renowned minds, her mom wrapped in a shawl and beaming beside her.
"My dream now is to work for NASA," said the 17-year-old high school senior. "I think I want to be an astrophysicist."
As the debate rages this month at Harvard University and elsewhere over how to get smart girls like Cordova -- and smart boys, for that matter -- into careers in math and science, fresh attention is being paid to an old standby: science camp.
Defying their stereotype as pencil-necked-nerd fests, summer programs in science and math are surging as college admissions have become more competitive and public schools have cut programs for gifted kids. Some aim to make science and math hip by targeting kids before peer pressure teaches them that brains are uncool; some have stirred controversy by targeting the best and brightest -- as opposed to the most needy -- and giving them even more motivation.
* The Sally Ride Science Camp for middle school girls is expanding after two years of capacity enrollment on the Stanford University campus. This year it will be held at four locations (Stanford University, the University of San Diego, UC Berkeley and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga.), with room for more than 1,000 kids.
* At Johns Hopkins University's 25-year-old Center for Talented Youth in Maryland, the granddaddy of camps for gifted children, demand for summer science and math programs has run so high in the past several years that the center has evolved a bevy of specialized spinoff courses in such subjects as genomics and neuroscience.
* COSMOS, more formally known as the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, has, in just five years, become one of the West Coast's more sought-after high school enrichment programs. Championed by Gayle Wilson, the former California first lady and Westinghouse scholar, and administered by the University of California, it was founded in 2000 as the tech boom was stalling and concern over the competitiveness of the U.S. labor force was rising. It has since served 1,930 eighth- to 12th-graders and expanded to four UC campuses.
Now, as its first campers progress through college, educators are tracking the program to see what impact, if any, it has had in turning today's whiz kids into tomorrow's mathematicians, doctors, astronomers, biomedical researchers and engineers. So far, the news is promising.
Life-changing experience
In questionnaires, a majority of COSMOS participants and alumnae say they plan to pursue careers in math or science. Enrollment among black and Latino students is still low -- 32.6% of last year's participants were white and 38.4% were Asian, compared with 16.5% Latino and 4.8% black (the remainder declined to state or listed themselves as "other") -- but 52% of the participants so far have been female. And students of both genders say their science camp experience was life-changing.
"I was going to be a lawyer," said Jamaal Sanders, one of the first COSMOS campers, who applied on a whim in 2000 after torn ligaments sidelined him from his soccer team in Pomona. At the time, he said, he just thought of himself as a bright kid who "liked solving problems and liked taking things apart and putting them together." Now he's at UC Irvine, studying to be a mechanical engineer.
