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BEAM Spring Newsletter 2017: BEAM expands to LA, our 12th graders commit to college, and we talk love of math.
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BEAM is coming to Los Angeles!

Funded by a $1,000,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, BEAM is expanding its programs to Los Angeles beginning summer 2018. We are hiring a Los Angeles-based Executive Director who will oversee this expansion. In 2018, we will run BEAM 6 in Los Angeles, and then add programs gradually as students age into them, including BEAM 7 in 2019 and then support that will serve students through 12th grade. 

This begins a period of significant growth for BEAM. We're not just hiring a Los Angeles Executive Director; we're also expanding our NYC staff to run several pilot programs that will serve even more students, in new ways. You can find more information about jobs on our website. Please share this newsletter with someone who would make a great BEAM team member!

Congratulations, 12th graders!

May 1 was decision day and it's such a treat to hear where our 12th graders are going to college. While we don't have final results for all 38 students, we want to offer congratulations to Joel (Wesleyan), Angelina (University of Rochester), Nicole (NYU), and Quentin (Ithaca)! You can see up to date college results on our blog
Throughout 11th and 12th grade, BEAM provides college advising to our students, starting with studying for the SAT and culminating in how to evaluate a financial aid package. 

Ana, for example, credits BEAM with being her primary college adviser, due to limited access to college counseling at her high school (where one guidance counselor serves 500 students).  Ana attended BEAM College Prep in August, where she started working on her college essay and learned about fly-in programs.  With BEAM's help, she applied to QuestBridge and was selected as a finalist. She was admitted to Barnard College with a full scholarship and plans to study topics at the intersection of statistics, economics, and social science. 

In her words, "BEAM has a been a place of growth and discovery for me.  BEAM encouraged me to aim high when applying for high school, additional summer programs, and college, and then supported me along the way. Thanks to BEAM, I am attending a great college with a full scholarship."

At BEAM, we love math.

Meet Betty Chen! Betty graduated from Duke University this month with a double major in Global Cultural Studies and Mathematics and a minor in African and African-American Studies. For the past two summers, Betty has worked for BEAM, first as a BEAM 7 Counselor and then as the BEAM 6 Director of Student Life. Recently, she wrote the following about her experiences with BEAM:

"Growing up, I was always good at math. I didn’t necessarily like math, but I was good at it. At Duke, I fell into advanced math classes and could not have felt less like a math major. There was a group of first-year math majors who knew what they were doing: they had already seen some fundamental theorems our professor mentioned in class and spoke authoritatively on what graduate level analysis classes they were going to take. I didn’t know what analysis was, much less the competing merits of Duke’s undergraduate and graduate level real analysis classes. When I was doing math on my own, though, I liked it; the ah-hah! moments when probability problems or short proofs stabilized into lucidity were addictive.

BEAM 7 was the first time I saw mathematicians stop and explain math to me. I vividly recall an instructor, Marcus, insisting that a theorem I had seen that past semester in Abstract Algebra was cool. Not that it was fundamental, not that we needed it in order to cover the next topic in the book, but that it was cool.


Hearing mathematicians articulate the wonder, joy, and ordering of mathematics was transformative. It fundamentally changed how I saw math. I could now put words to the ah-hah! moments I loved about math, because that was what there was to love about math—not if I knew what words in course catalogs meant. BEAM 7 gave me permission to love what I loved about math, and recognize that as math. Math is now the gooey, elusive, and prickly edges of patterns not quite seen and the tremendous elephants in the room that assemble everything around us in their depths. I like math now, and I spend as much time and energy as I can now insisting to others that math is cool."

At BEAM, we truly love math and we emphasize finding joy and beauty in interesting mathematical problems. We were so pleased to hear Betty's story and to see the impact we have both on students and on staff as well. 
 
Betty (left) with Benjy, Josh, and Oksana, all BEAM 7 Counselors, working on math problems for fun!

What We're Reading

"Working on mathematical skills is not unlike practicing a sport: neither can be learned by watching others perform the activity and both require encouragement and effort." In this year-old (but no less relevant) op-ed in The Washington Post, Petra Bonfert-Taylor discusses research on how math anxiety, spread by adults, has real impact on outcomes, especially for girls. There are so many great moments in this op-ed, including a clear plea to adults to stop using the phrase, "I am bad at math"!

A recent study published in Economics of Education Review shows how access to challenging courses for Wake County middle schoolers did and did not change student trajectory. The research on Wake County Public Schools was co-authored by Art of Problem Solving Foundation Board Member and all-around BEAM supporter Darryl Hill.

We are mesmerized by this map that shows educational attainment through dot density (the map is currently centered on LA, but you can re-center to view anywhere in the US). We've been using it to center in on high needs areas in Los Angeles, but there's all kinds of other interesting take-aways! You can read more about the map methodology here

Your support makes BEAM happen. 

BEAM provides all our services for free to underserved students from low-income communities. We rely on donations, large and small, to continue supporting the next generation of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and programmers. 

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Copyright © 2017 Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, All rights reserved.


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