Smashing Silicon Valley’s biases

SMASH provides full funding for high-achieving, low-income high school students of color to spend time on campus for five weeks during the summers after their 9th, 10th and 11th grade years. They are immersed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), conduct experiments and participate in group discussions. They are taught by leading scholars and provided access to the most advanced research equipment. Then they are provided with year-round academic support including SAT prep, college counseling, and other support to ensure their academic success.

The results speak for themselves: 100 percent of SMASH graduates have been accepted to competitive four-year colleges, and the overwhelming majority persist as STEM majors, according to Freada. Kids from under-performing public schools who are eligible for free lunches have often never heard of MIT or Middlebury or Morehouse, but those are campuses now populated with SMASH alumni.

Personal Post

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa is vice president of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University and Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. His other academic appointments include Harvard, Duke and Emory Universities as well as the University of California Berkeley.

Archive

• Facebook
• E-mail
• @Wadhwa

Mitch Kapor

Latest from Ideas@Innovations

Has China created the first social credit card?

Dominic Basulto

The card serves as the latest proof that China is close to challenging America’s top financial services innovators.

• More by Dominic Basulto

Thinking innovation? Think toilets.

Emi Kolawole

When it comes to innovation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting the toilet front and center.

Is a moon colony on the horizon?

Benjamin Gottlieb and Sarah Parvini

Imagine a machine that could build a 2,000 square foot home in under 24 hours. Imagine one that could do that on the surface of the moon?

SMASH has grown since 2004 from one site at UC Berkeley to four sites throughout the state. Another site is opening at the University of Chicago in 2013, and the program’s organizers are in discussions with 18 other campuses to expand nationally. The goal? Twenty-five sites by 2020.

The biggest limiting factor is funding. The program is expensive and the universities—even those with large endowments, such as Stanford—still charge the start-up non-profit full price for room and board. It’s the single, greatest line item in the SMASH budget.

SMASH has a rigorous and evolving curriculum, experiments with blended learning, including MySciHigh, which won first place at a recent Startup Weekend. The program also has a detailed operations manual for launching new sites. A STEM teacher training academy is also in its sights as the program explores how to scale its success.

When I visited SMASH at Stanford in July and talked to many of the participating students. They called the program “life-changing” and talked about how it made them determined to become and engineer or scientist.

Maria Castillo, a senior from Richmond High in California said the program inspired her to become an engineer so she could help solve the energy crisis. SMASH, she said, “inspired me to speak my opinions no matter what other people think.”

Hi Vo, a senior at Delmar High school in San Jose, gushed about how excited he had become about learning math and science because of the great scientists he met at Stanford. Daryle Alums, a student at KIPP King Collegiate in San Lorenzo, CA, said SMASH got him interested in computer science and that he had started a company with his friends.

I have little doubt that these students’ excitement and the sense of hope they developed is infectious. We just need thousands more like them returning to schools around the country to inspire the others.

The author is a Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance fellow at Stanford University.

Read more news and ideas on Innovations.