High School Students Win Scholarships to Study at GSD

Two Boston students have been awarded scholarships to attend the Career Discovery Program which began last week at the Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Vivian Chau of the O'Bryant School of Math and Science and Jeffrey Leon of the Boston Latin School received the scholarships through the Historic Neighborhoods City/Build Program. Both will be juniors in high school this fall.

Chau, a Dorchester resident, will be studying urban planning at the GSD, while Leon, who lives in Brighton, will learn architecture.

The five-year-old City/Build Program "is one where professionals go out to Boston Public high schools to teach courses on planning, design, construction and architecture," said Ann Ambiel, the City/Build Coordinator.

"Students see the site and projects being built and meet the people in charge," she said.

"Our goal is to open the fields to inner city kids so they can go into the fields either through more study or work in the future," said Nina Meyer, director of the Historic Neighborhoods Foundation.

The City/Build Program runs classes at three Boston high schools, including the O'Bryant School of Math and Science and the Boston Latin School, for one semester. Classes run once a week from January through June at participating high schools, Meyer said.

The program is part of the regular curriculum at the O'Bryant school, and students receive credit for the classes taken.

The O'Bryant school, in a partnership with the Harvard Community Health Plan, which is building a new health facility for ambulatory health care, taught architecture and urban planning lessons as part of an honors math course.

"The point was to make these classes more relevant," Meyer said.

At the Boston Latin School, City/Build was an afterschool program only.

The school worked with the Harvard Institute for Medicine, which is also in the process of building a new facility.

At both the O'Bryant School and Boston Latin, participating students worked with engineers and architects from the individual building sites to learn about careers in building, planning and architecture.

People working on the two Harvard building projects taught the students lessons in drawing and planning, and students toured the actual construction sites to study their lessons.

"The unique thing about City Build is that we have a volunteer faculty," Meyer said. "People who are engineers and architects come into the class and give classes."

"They develop mentor relationships [with the students]," she said.

Each student in the program is required to produce a final project related to the field they studied throughout the semester.

Chau, who worked with the Harvard Community Health Plan project, studied the new facility's floor plans and designed a space for the community center.

Leon, who studied the new Harvard Institute of Medicine facility, built a model and produced architectural drawings of the building.

"A member of the [Institute's building] committee saw the drawings and the model and said it was exceptional quality work for a high school students," Meyer said.

The high quality of the final projects won the students scholarships to the GSD summer Career Discovery Program.

Chau and Leon captured two of the 20 scholarships offered by the program, and have joined a group of 250 students for six weeks of instruction.

They will work in "studio groups" of 10 or 11 students, instructed by recent graduates of the GSD, according to Carol L. Varney, the spokesperson for the career