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Dear Jennifer Nossal: My daughter, Jessie Rosenberg, attended your Summer Program several years ago. (We're not sure whether it was the summer after her fourth grade (1995) or fifth grade (1996.) I just had occasion to visit your web site when someone asked me (even though we now live near Charlottesville) about opportunities for gifted kids in Fairfax, and I was glad to see you're still going strong. I also thought you might like to learn that you had a significant impact on Jessie, who is probably (if I do say so myself) one of your most successful graduates to date. You might like to take a look at this brief notice about her below. As you will see there, Jessie skipped high school altogether, graduated from Bryn Mawr last May, at 17, and is now a first year graduate student in Applied Physics at Caltech. She had not realized she was good at math, and liked it, until her summer with you. (The reference to the chart on the wall at "camp" was your camp.) We can't recall her teacher's name from that summer, but he tested her (and others) before beginning the math instruction, and as I do recall she wound up somewhere in Algebra 1. I'm not even sure she'd learned the multiplication table in school by then. Anyway, since that summer, and your chart on the wall, she's remained on a bee line for physics. Keep up the good work! Best, John Rosenberg Scholarship Fund Helps Budding Physicist Most parents understand the papers their 17-year-olds are turning in at the end of the school year. But John and Helene Rosenberg, who served with USAID from 1977 to 2000, have pretty much given up on comprehending every word of Jessie’s papers. Jessie attended Henley Middle School until she was 13, and then skipped high school in favor of Mary Baldwin College’s Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. After exhausting all of the college’s physics offerings her freshman year, she transferred to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. “Jessie always had a voracious appetite for books when she was younger,” her father said. He used to read to Jessie before bed when she was little, and chose books about the planets, volcanoes and even the plague. “Our agreement was we would stop if we reached a word she didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce,” he said. One night when she was about four years old, Jessie was reading to him about diseases. She pronounced the word “contagious” correctly and moved on. John reminded her about their agreement to stop reading when she did not know a word. “I know what it means,” she said. John said he asked her what it meant and she looked at him and said, “Spreadful.” Jessie said she was later inspired to study physics by a poster she saw on a wall at camp one year. The poster listed the various types of math utilized in different professions. “Physics was the only one that used all types of math,” she said. Under the Merit Award Program of American Foreign Service Association Scholarship Fund, talented Foreign Service high school seniors are recognized with financial awards. Jessie Rosenberg received an Academic Merit Award for her scholastic performance, and stated college at age 13. Having graduated from Bryn Mawr College in May 2004, Jessie, now 17, plans to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at CalTech, where she hopes to narrow her field of study to photonics. Jessie's parents strongly believe the AFSA award not only helped financially, but it boosted their daughter's confidence. "It demonstrated to Jessie that she was special and that someone other than her immediate family recognized her achievements," says her mother. | ||||||||||
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