The pleasure of working with USA/USA Students

Subject:

Comments:
: The pleasures of working with USA/USA Students. : Our students this year were truly outstanding. I have met four out of the six new students who came to America this year, but know the other two well enough to describe them here. : AR has begun Brown University in Providence RI on a full four-year college scholarship. He turned down a full four-year college scholarship to Dartmouth and was on the waiting list to Harvard College. Andriy is from the Azov sea city of Berdyansk. Some of his ancestors are from Russia. We selected him before he entered the University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which he entered in 2003. His parents make a living by reselling second hand clothes on the streets of Berdyansk. : AR scored 1340 in 2003 the first time he took the SATs with a 680 on the SAT II Writing exam in 2003. On his first try, he did not win any scholarships. : Perhaps, more importantly he was a striker in the tent city of the Orange Revolution from the very first day. That was before the bulk of Kyiv Mohyla students, led by President Brioukhovetsky, joined the strike. During the Orange Revolution he took the SAT I exams scoring 1400; he also scored 700 on the SAT II Writing. That was the highest score of anyone in our program in recent years. : AR is pursuing political science at Brown University. His desire is to be a political analyst. When he arrived from Moscow at my apartment he immediately looked at my books, took a history of Athens, and began reading it despite having been up over twenty-four hours. Brown has no required courses and so this student has four years to pursue whatever his mind desires. He has the maturity and time to prepare himself for the best graduate schools. AR is athletic and has worked as a physical trainer. As a UKMA student he is obviously fluent in Ukrainian. : : KK is a very energetic seventeen year old from Kerch in eastern Crimea. She is a recent graduate of School #1 in that city. This girl is an all around student with very strong skills in the sciences and languages. She came very highly recommended from her school. She has her heart set on singing and acting and has the charm to be competitive in that arena. She has won a two-year scholarship to Emma Willard in Troy New York, the oldest girls’ boarding school in America. She scored 1210 on her SAT I last year and now has two years to raise it to a perfect 2400 on the new SAT I. During the Orange Revolution she traveled all the way from Kerch to Lviv to take her SAT I exams. She is an avid Ukrainian speaker and told me how she learned her Ukrainian from a Russian-speaking teacher in her school. Her ancestors are from Zhytomyr oblast and of partially Polish extraction. She complained about the bad mixing of Ukrainian and Russian languages in Ukraine created by the lack of quality dictionaries and reading materials. This did not prevent her from continuously correcting my Ukrainian. When she arrived at Emma Willard she phoned me to thank me in Ukrainian for our help. Her mother is the main bookkeeper for a local Turkish owned shipping company. : : TH is a quiet but very bright scientifically oriented woman from the Zaporizhzhia city of Enerhodar. She is entering Lafayette College in Pennsylvania on a full four-year college scholarship. She is interested in biomedical engineering. She won a full four college. She is beginning with a heavy load of chemistry. TH is also an excellent writer and has thought of becoming a scientific interpreter. It was her essay that persuaded me to take her into the program. She was the last student selected in 2004 and did not disappoint scoring 1310 the first and only time she took the SAT I and 670 on the SAT II Writing. She is a Russian speaker at home but is highly proficient in Ukrainian. Something in me wants her to be a writer. Such students benefit most from education in America since they can pursue a broad range of subjects. Her parents are engineers and work at or with the local nuclear power plant. : AK is very confident fifteen year old who began Western Reserve Academy in Ohio on a one year renewable scholarship. He is from Yalta. He is not only the English language national high school champion of Ukraine for his age group. He is also a very proficient violinist having soloed with the Crimean National Symphony Orchestra. AK is very bright and at the age of fourteen and three months took the SAT I for the first time and scored 1240. I was concerned about having such a bright young man leave home. But he is mature and even elderly for his age. His family are not affluent enough to help him pursue the violin or pay for his education in a major university. He is of apparently mixed Ukrainian and Russian origin. His Ukrainian is fluent and though he goes to an allegedly “Russian” school as most students in Crimea do his education seems to have been in Ukrainian. (Nothing is ever simple in Ukraine.) Both his parents are classical musicians. : : IK is a very driven young man from the selyshche of Kupyansk Vuzlovy in Kharkiv oblast. He won the two year Korean War Veterans Scholarship at Milton Academy in suburban Boston. This is a breeding ground for Ivy League students and one of the top ten private high schools in America. This man had his heart set on basketball but decided to go the academic route. He is extremely determined and hard working and was the surprise success of the 2003 seminar. He scored 1200 on the SAT I the first time he took it and now has two years to improve his score to a perfect 2400 on the new SAT I. This young man did his applications from 1 AM to 6 AM in the morning because that was the only time he had access to Internet. He strikes me as frighteningly ambitious. His long-term interest is law. His mother is a teacher of Ukrainian in school. His father is otherwise employed. I simply do not recall. All members of his family speak Ukrainian. I know I spoke with all of them at one time or another. : : PK is from Mirhorod in Poltava oblast. He is the son of a divorced English high school teacher. His father is an engineer. Pavlo was in our Seminar in 2001. At that time, he earned a scholarship to American Leysin, a school literally in the Swiss Alps. Having the benefit of three years of free education, he had no trouble acing his SAT I scoring 1420. He also scored 670 on the Writing. SAT II. He won full four-year college scholarships to six colleges including Stanford, Duke, the University of Virginia, and Harvard. Duke and UVa flew him from Switzerland to look over their campuses. He chose Harvard. His interest is engineering. His family is Ukrainian speaking. : : The above students won about $680,000 in scholarships this year. That does not include the scholarships that they rejected. It also does not include the scholarships they won in previous years as in the case of Pavlo Kononenko. : : An additional student, TV from our 2004 seminar won a prep school scholarship late into the summer and decided to defer it for a year. She wants to improve her SAT I exams and complete her high school education in Ukraine. Her father owns a shoe store in Poltava. : : The youngest student from our 2003 seminar, ML from Zaporizhzhia, won the Freedom Support Act scholarship this year. He is attending public school in rural Maryland and living with a host family. He has competed on national level in rowing in Ukraine (giving up a future in basketball school) and has excellent prospects for entry into a top-flight college in the USA. He was six foot three at the age of fifteen being remarking well built. He has gone out for cross-country and hopes to play varsity basketball at his high school in America. This young man is a very hard worker but has had trouble improving his SATs to a competitive level because he goes to a German immersion school in Zaporizhzhia. So English is his fourth language. Like most of our students he is fluent in four languages. He is obviously fluent in Ukrainian. His father works in a bank in a midlevel position but not enough to afford a computer at home. : : I will later write what these students need from the Diaspora. : Bohdan A. Oryshkevich : Founder and Coordinator : USA/USA Program : info@ukrainianscholarships.org