Alexandra Crowder wasn't sure what she had gotten herself into when she arrived at The Putney School, an independent high school focused on sustainability and art in the forests of Vermont.
Ashton Mayo-Beavers felt the same way at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she found herself building and preparing remote-controlled robots to battle in an arena.
2018 PASSPORT SCHOLARS
> Ashton Mayo-Beavers, Chattanooga High Center for Creative Arts, Smith College > Jada Brown, Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, University of Rochester > Alexandra Crowder, Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, The Putney School > Sophia Dozier, Sale Creek Middle/High School, University of Rochester > Winter Hillard, Sale Creek Middle/High School, University of Rochester > Deliyah Ledford, Brainerd High School, Indiana University of Pennsylvania: Cook Honors College > Kathryn Parks, Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, Smith College > Kendall Stolpmann, Red Bank High School, Indiana University of Pennsylvania: Cook Honors College
Kendall Stolpmann never thought she'd ride an airplane - at least not until she was an adult, and definitely not to a college campus in Pennsylvania while she was a sophomore in high school.
These are three of the eight girls who got to travel to college campuses across the country and step outside of their comfort zones as part of the Public Education Foundation's Passport Scholars program.
The program, which selects highly-motivated, high-achieving female high school sophomores, has sent more than 200 rising juniors to rigorous summer programs across the country for 17 years.
"Congratulations on your achievement, you courage, your persistence and congratulations on your choice," the foundation's president, Dan Challener, told the students during a showcase and reception Tuesday evening. "Civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman had a saying, 'You can't be what you can't see.' What I love about Passport Scholars is it turns that around and now you can be what you see, what you are, what you did this summer."
This is how Mayo-Beavers feels looking back on her experience at Smith College this summer.
"One of the biggest things is that I made friends and they changed me and my aspirations" she said. "They helped me find myself and see myself in my aspirations. Science and engineering, or STEM, is so big, but I can see myself in that field and now I ask, 'So what can I contribute to it?'"
The students are selected through a rigorous process including an application, essay, teacher recommendations, phone interview, and a final interview with a panel from the Public Education Foundation. The nonprofit helps match the girls with a summer program at a college or university that fulfills their interests.
Winter Hilliard and Sophia Dozier from Sale Creek Middle/High School are both interested in careers in the medical field - Hilliard wants to be an anesthesiologist and Dozier wants to be a nurse practitioner or an emergency room doctor.
The pair got to spend three weeks at the University of Rochester Pre-College Program in New York this summer, where they took pre-med classes like biology, anatomy and genetics. They learned how to intubate dummies, do sutures and even handled real human cadavers' hearts.
Dozier's mother, Jennifer Padgett, said her daughter's experience was worth the anxiety she had about sending her hundreds of miles away.
"I was excited because I felt like this was something you had to experience," Padgett said. "I wanted her to go and to experience this opportunity, because so many people in our community don't get this experience."
Contact staff writer Meghan Mangrum at mmangrum@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6592. Follow her on Twitter @memangrum.