Three NA Students Attend Select Summer Academic Programs

Three Newark Academy seniors enjoyed success in select academic summer programs.
 
Ruqaiyyah Lucas-Caldwell '20 attended the New Jersey Scholars Program at The Lawrenceville School, a highly selective residential program for academically talented high school students. Ethan Chee '20 attended the New Jersey Governor's School for the Sciences (NJSS), a prestigious three-week residential program where students are immersed in intense college-level research at Drew University. Warren Sunada-Wong '20 attended the New Jersey Governor's School for Engineering and Technology (GSET), an intensive residential program, where students work on a novel research project to be showcased in a conference-style paper and presentations at Rutgers University. Warren’s group's research paper, "A Vision-Based Hygiene Monitoring System: Using Deep Learning to Assess Handwashing Procedure in Real Time,” has been accepted for presentation at the 2019 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC) in October.
 
Nominated by NA to apply to attend their respective programs, the students got a taste of studying college courses in their respective fields, helping them decipher where to look for colleges and having a look inside college courses by actually taking them.
The experience reaffirmed their passions.
 
For Ethan, that was a full course load in a three-week residential program, doing intense college-level research, taking a class on chemistry, physics and neurobiology to go along with a computer science lab a machine learning project.
 
Ethan wants to study computer science in college, which as he did with his lab and the machine learning team project. It also helps as he begins the college application process as he selects schools to apply, sitting in larger lecture-style classes for the first time.
 
“Coming from a small school community where the classes are really intimate. I wasn't sure if I would be able to even learn when someone just lecturing to me,” Ethan said. “But I had a good time, I was able to still learn even when there wasn't as much student-to-teacher interaction. That made me feel more confident applying to bigger schools knowing that I’d still be able to be successful and happy there.”
 
Warren realized that he’d like to go to a selective school with really good programs, like an MIT, “because it's just it's so great being around other students who are so knowledgeable, and you can learn a lot from them.”
 
Excelling at his program at Rutgers, Warren will get to do just that, presenting his paper and attending workshops and talks at MIT from October 11-13. Warren's group project is a hygiene monitoring system using cloud computing services to create a machine learning model that can recognize whether or not someone is washing their hands properly based on the recommended ways by the World Health Organization.
 
“We're very happy to be nominated,” Warren said. “It’s intended for our undergraduate research. And since we're in high school, it's a pretty big achievement.”
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