Motivation through mentors
When Harvard College’s Vanessa Decembre ’16 advised a room of local high school students to “never sell yourselves short,” sophomore Chris Raymond was paying close attention. Raymond, who attends Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester, never thought he would be able to go to college. But hearing Decembre and other members of a panel talk about their journeys from high school to college had a profound impact on his perspective. The panel, made up of mentors who worked closely with 32 rising sophomores summer, featured three current Harvard students as well as students from Williams College and Boston College. Even more relevant to the audience, some of the panelists were graduates of the Crimson Summer Academy (CSA), the same program that brought Raymond and 85 other Boston and Cambridge high school students in all to Harvard’s campus this summer. “The fact that they faced a lot of the struggles that we do,...