July 18, 2007
Challenges for Black Colleges’ Brightest in the Lab
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
New York Times
On the June morning when James Lucas first met Stephanie E. Sen outside the research laboratory she oversaw, he made one request. “Don’t put me on a project that’s too important,” he said. He could already envision himself botching an experiment and losing Professor Sen a lot of money. He worried that after all the hype about what a prodigy he was in chemistry, he wouldn’t measure up.
In her polite and genial way, Professor Sen spurned his plea. The reason Mr. Lucas had come to the joint Indiana University-Purdue University campus here was to do important work. The entire point was that a promising 18-year-old be dropped into a lab populated by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
Mr. Lucas, barely a year out of high school, was supposed to be awed by the mechanical menagerie, the instruments for spectrometry, liquid chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance.
One other bit of personal history applied. Mr. Lucas had just completed his freshman year at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and he had been selected this summer as part of a new program intended to bring gifted science students from the archipelago of historically black colleges and universities in the South to two major research universities farther north for an eight-week immersion...
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/education/18education.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin
