Can Trouble Teens Turn Their Lives Around and Get Into an Ivy League School?

Yes! Here’s a true story.

When I first started working with Michael Beck in 2011, he was dropping out of classes at a local community college and his mother was beside herself with anxiety.  She knew Michael was smart but couldn’t understand why he just didn’t do the work to pass his classes. 

I knew as soon as I met Michael that he was going to be a huge challenge because he was bright but couldn’t understand why he should do mundane busy work in classes that he wasn’t interested in taking.  Hmm.  Sometimes it’s difficult to reason with logic. My goal was to get Michael to find his passion, layout a plan to achieve it, and coach him as he had to retrain and rethink his education.

Michael bombed out in high school because he didn’t go to classes or do his homework – he preferred to smoke weed and drink with his friends.  The only reason he graduated from high school was because he could always take the final exam and pass it (remember, he’s really smart).  Getting him to adopt the Merit Planner and stick to a schedule so he can learn concepts, do assignments, and prepare for difficult college exams was a constant battle.  I knew I couldn’t trick him into studying, I needed to capture his attention and give him a reason to do the work.

After many discussions about politics and environmental issues, Michael became concerned about Climate Change and headed the Kids 4 Hydrogen team to find solutions to the world’s energy and CO2 problems.  He met with PhDs to learn all that he could about hydrogen production and fuel cells.  When he realized how engineering was going to give him the skill set he will need to solve some of these major issues, Michael got serious about his education.  Instead of fighting professors about the value of each assignment, he just did it.  He started getting A’s in all of his classes, and that’s when he recognized that he understood concepts in ways that his peers didn’t.  This was a turning point for Michael.

After Michael took the chemistry series at UCSC in one summer and got all A’s, he knew he was on to something exciting.  But when he was ready to apply to transfer into an engineering program, he worried that his terrible grades from his past would haunt him.  Thankfully, the University of Portland recognized his potential (love it when colleges look beyond GPAs) and Michael thrived in the mechanical and electrical engineering programs.  He was clearly one of the top students in his program when he graduated a few weeks ago.  Michael had developed good relationships with his engineering professors and enjoyed intellectual discussions with them outside of the classroom.

Michael is going to study robotics in grad school and he has been accepted to all of the graduate schools that he applied to.  These acceptances include the prestigious GRASP Robotics Lab at UPenn and the world-renowned Robotics program at Carnegie Mellon. They both offer the best robotics programs in the country.  I know that Michael will blossom in grad school because he will be working with peers and professors who share his passion for learning and solving critical problems.  I am so proud to watch this kid who fought the system and was heading down a destructive path, now head off to an Ivy League college (or CMU) this fall. 

I can’t wait to see what he does in grad school, and I just know he will change the world.