Students engrossed in summer programme at Carnegie Mellon Tuesday, 27 July 2010 01:43

Classes for the Summer College Preview Programme (SCPP) at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar started last week offering high school students an opportunity to learn skills to prepare them for university.

In its fourth year, the programme targets rising high school juniors and seniors by giving an in-depth focus on college-level material that students will undertake in their university life.

SCPP’s mission is to prepare top high school students for admission in highly selective universities such as Carnegie Mellon. Extending on a three-week time frame, SCPP started on July 18 and runs until August 5. It welcomed over 40 registered students from different educational backgrounds, ranging between public, private, and independent schools in Qatar and the region.

With roughly 200 applicants, the Summer College Preview Programme remains highly selective, with students applying from Qatar, India, Kuwait, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

“Our desire is to make good students better,” said Bruce Volstad, the manager of the Pre-College Programme at Carnegie Mellon Qatar. “This programme helps students who have a dream of studying at a western university bring their dream and reality together,” he added.

To this end, the programme covers advanced knowledge in subjects, such as mathematics, English and SAT preparation through SAT practice exams to give the students a more concrete insight into the workload expected of university students, especially in highly-ranked universities, such as Carnegie Mellon where rigorous performance yields excellence. Classes are taught by current CMU students to allow a more peer-to-peer interaction. The programme also aims to work on the students’ personal development through student workshops offered during the programme with an emphasis on the student’s role and responsibility in the learning process by introducing them to techniques and strategies required for college students’ success.

Throughout the three weeks of the programme, the students are offered the opportunity to work in groups on a capstone project in one of the degree programmes that Carnegie Mellon offers in Doha: Business Administration, Computer Science or Information Systems. This project utilises all the skills learned during the programme in one interactive and challenging project that they will then present to their classmates.

“The independence and pressure of university life is very different from what students face in high school and the SCPP does an exceptional job at allowing students to get a feel of that difference,” said Aliah Dehdary, an alumna of the SCPP and a current student at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.

She added that the programme offered a strong and thorough idea of what CMU was about.

“If it weren’t for the programme, I probably wouldn’t have attended Carnegie Mellon,” she said. “One of the best things all the students can walk away with is getting to meet new people and becoming friends with many,” she added.

She said she met many students during her SCPP and saw almost all of them, becoming friends with almost all of them over a period of three years.

THE PENINSULA