Rachel Ho is a rising 10th-grader at Langley High School in McLean. She loves writing and thinks she might want to follow in her mother’s footsteps and study at the University of Virginia.
To get a taste of UVA, she attended the Inspire Summer program, an academic program for rising 10th- through 12th-graders at UVA Northern Virginia’s Fairfax campus, to explore new skills and interests.
Rising 10th- to 12th-graders can pick between several courses ranging from creative writing to engineering to marketing. (Contributed photo)
Students chose from 12 courses this summer. The program runs for six weeks, but individual courses vary from one to two weeks, giving students the option to take several courses.
Rachel attended a one-week creative writing course last month as a way to flex her creative muscle and spend some time on a UVA campus. The five teens in the program spent days writing from prompts and sharing their work.
“I especially like how we got to work with the college professor, because you got to see how a relationship between a student and professors is very different from middle school and high school,” she said. “It feels less formal and more collaborative.”
Her brother, Jason, also spent some of the summer with Inspire, attending engineering and marketing courses.
Their mother, Tammy Le, a UVA graduate, said she liked that her children got to spend time on a college campus in preparation for what life will look like in a few years. “I have a warm spot in my heart for UVA, so it was great to see their satellite campus open up so close to us,” she said. “The campus and program really exceeded our expectations.”
