Mike Lovett

Samia Tamazi ’20

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In 2006, Epstein won a four-year $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop a Posse program specifically for students from the New York City area interested in the sciences. (The grant was renewed in 2010.) Associate professor of biology Melissa Kosinski-Collins, who has published widely on science education, believed incoming Science Posse students needed exposure to college-level science before the chaos of Orientation in late August and the transition to a full schedule of college classes.

Enter Science Posse “boot camp,” a 10-day science immersion program Kosinski-Collins created to introduce students to the rigor and expectations of college-level science classes at a premier research university. Boot camp is not remedial. It is intensive, helping incoming students develop the confidence to persist even in times of struggle. Godsoe describes boot camp as a “vaccine” — an inoculation that prepares each posse for the challenges ahead.

The first Science Posse of 10 students arrived on campus in 2008 against the backdrop of a national shortage of students of color studying science. According to a report by the nonprofit American Institutes for Research, only 13 percent of undergraduate STEM degrees were awarded to Hispanics and African-Americans in 2009, despite the fact that these groups make up 28 percent of the U.S. population.

The Science Posse program was created to help reverse this troubling trend. And it’s a success. Most Brandeis Posse STEM students graduate with a degree in a science major and stay in a science-related field. Program alumni are enrolled in medical schools, working as researchers in labs, earning master’s degrees, teaching science in schools, or working at drug and biotech companies. Usman Hameedi and Gloriya Nedler, both ’12, graduates of the first Science Posse, are among the program’s success stories.

So far, nine other colleges, including Middlebury, the University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M and Smith, have replicated the Science Posse program following the example of the Brandeis model.

“The Science Posse program is extraordinary in its success,” says Godsoe. “The program demonstrates the power of having a cohort of students working together and focused not only on their individual success but the success of the group.”

As one Posse Scholar told her, “Posse works because we make sure no one is left behind.”

The hardest academic challenge

In June, Macareno and his posse, all Class of 2020, get off Amtrak’s Acela Express train and take a shuttle bus to Brandeis for science boot camp. On the first day, they gather in a classroom in the Abelson physics building, the air conditioner cranked so high everyone is shivering. (Science buildings are notoriously cold, the students will learn.) Some of them already own Brandeis sweatshirts and water bottles, and they bring along the scientific calculators they were given the day before.

Kosinski-Collins, who earned a PhD at MIT, tells them college science is profoundly different from high-school science. With equal parts candor and caring, she sets high expectations, describing the intense workload. The students know that they will be held to lofty standards and that she will support them.

Later in the day, they gather around a long lab table in the Shapiro Science Center, in an area Kosinski-Collins calls Hufflepuff — a nod to one of the houses at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School. An array of equipment is scattered before them — pipettes, balances, bottles of acetic acid (vinegar) and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). There are also aluminum foil, Kimwipes, Scotch tape and Ziploc bags.

The students’ assignment is to build an air bag. When acetic acid combines with sodium bicarbonate, they produce carbon dioxide. The students must figure out how much of each chemical to add to fully inflate a quart-size Ziploc bag. But they also have to protect an egg placed inside the bag. This is where the foil, tape and extra bags come in. Along with the cushion of air, these items can be used to keep the egg from cracking when they drop the bag from the Science Center steps, about 15 feet above the ground.

There’s an important catch. Several months earlier, at a meeting in New York, the students got the same assignment. They also completed lab reports describing the quantities of chemicals they used and how they arranged the materials inside the bag to protect the egg. These lab reports are now handed out to different students. They have 10 minutes to repeat the earlier experiment using the reports as a guide.

It’s an important lesson in communication skills and reproducibility. An experiment is valid only if others can carry it out and get the same results. In science, precision and clarity are everything.

The students quickly realize this. The lab reports aren’t clear enough to provide much guidance. “Why did you have to make this so complicated?” one student asks the original author of a report.

“No time for complaining. Do what you got to do,” her peer tells her.

Kosinski-Collins announces time’s up. The task hasn’t gone so well for most. “I think I’m going to go into the humanities,” jokes Samia Tamazi. “Philosophy’s always an option.”

Tamazi grew up in Queens. Until recently, her parents ran a small business that removed asbestos and other environmental hazards from buildings. Tamazi attended Francis Lewis High School, where she took AP classes in biology, calculus, U.S. history and English.

She says she chose Brandeis because of its students’ commitment to social justice. She also liked their work habits. “No matter what time of night it is,” she says, “there were people in the library.”

In 1988, Tamazi’s mother was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents, immigrants from a small rural town in the Dominican Republic, wouldn’t let her go. They knew little about the American college system, Penn’s prestige or the scale of their daughter’s accomplishment, Tamazi says.

They also expected their daughter to remain close to home in Brooklyn. “She was a girl,” says Tamazi. “She wasn’t supposed to go away.” Her mother enrolled at a local community college but never graduated.

What she couldn’t get for herself — a college education — Tamazi’s mother wanted for her daughter. Now that Samia is at Brandeis, studying to become a doctor, her mother’s message is clear: “You better make the most of it.”

Tamazi wants to make her mother feel proud. “She gave me so much. I want to give back,” she says.