Harvard faculty and administrators led the students on tours of labs in Astronomy, Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Systems Biology, Biological Sciences in Public Health, Physics, Chemistry, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The students, all majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields and considering careers in academia and research, were part of the Dr. John H. Hopps, Jr. Research Scholars Program. Named for eminent Morehouse alumnus John. H. Hopps, who held senior positions at the National Science Foundation, MIT’s Draper Lab, and in the Department of Defense, the program’s goal is to dramatically increase the number of Morehouse students pursuing graduate degrees in those STEM fields. Hopps Scholars participate in a highly structured program that includes research-based mentoring with faculty, seminars, courses, and special social and extracurricular activities — and each year they use part of their spring break to visit universities across the country to meet faculty and explore research options.
Accompanying the scholars on their trip — which also included stops at MIT and Tufts — was Hopps’s widow, June Gary Hopps, the Parham Professor of Social Policy at the University of Georgia and Dean and Professor Emerita at Boston College’s Graduate School of Social Work.
The visit was a success — and not only for the Morehouse students, who enjoyed the insider’s look at Harvard’s resources and the chance to interact with faculty and meet current GSAS students over lunch at Cambridge Queen’s Head pub. Their Harvard faculty hosts also appreciated the chance to get to know Morehouse and make connections with its students. E-mail addresses were exchanged, as were offers to follow up and answer questions. The new relationships may yield an increase in the number of Morehouse graduates who apply to PhD programs at Harvard, but they may also result in invitations for Harvard faculty to give talks at the college or otherwise embark on collaborations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
