The first cohort of high school students in the College’s Guiding Outstanding Learners to Discover© (GOLD) program recently successfully completed their 9-month program. Twenty students from Nanjing #1 High School in Nanjing, China arrived in February to meet with their graduate mentors and finish their projects.

For eight months, graduate students from our Chemistry and CBE departments had been working remotely with these high school students on such varied projects as air pollution, building a better battery and solar cells. Once on site at the College, the students spent time in their mentors’ labs and completed the write-ups of their experiments, to be displayed and judged at a poster session. This was a novel approach to learning the scientific method for these students, as there is currently no academic culture of high school science fairs in China.

The students presented their final projects in Bixby North. The first-place winner, Tommy Xu, received an engraved trophy for his project, “Improvements in Broadleaf Tea Products.” All of the students received completion-of-program certificates from Dean Clark.