By Benjamin Hong, Co-Editor-in-Chief
While most River Hill students prepare for college through AP classes and SAT prep, senior Christopher Austin has spent the past year taking part in Johns Hopkins’ Future Scholars Program. Only the second student in River Hill’s history to participate, he is taking advantage of the unique opportunity to earn college credits for upper-division math coursework.
Run by the university’s mathematics department, the Future Scholars program offers high school seniors with an aptitude for mathematics the chance to take one course per semester tuition-free, working alongside Hopkins students and receiving mentorship from acclaimed faculty. Yet despite the apparent value of this program, it remains relatively obscure at River Hill. “It’s not really pushed by teachers,” Austin explains, “but I’d really like it to be because it really is a fantastic program. You get to be among peers who are just proper students there, and you really get to explore the opportunities at Hopkins.”
This semester, Austin is enrolled in Real Analysis, an upper-division course known for its abstract nature and difficulty. The workload is substantial, comprising 10-20 hours of challenging problem sets weekly, but Austin views this rigor as the program’s greatest benefit, explaining that “being forced to work on really challenging problems forces you to get better at problem solving and … most of all makes you confront yourself in seeing how you learn. And despite the course’s theoretical nature, Austin has already found broader applicability from the hours he has invested, explaining that “if I’m doing physics or something, a much more rigorous way of viewing things helps build a lot more intuition than just the general way of looking at it.”
High school juniors can be nominated for the program by a teacher and a school counselor in early spring of each year, with selected students moving on to a rigorous entrance examination. The test spans content through AP Calculus BC, but, as Austin explains, the nature of the exam is much different from a standard AP test. The problems emphasize strong problem-solving skills, making them “significantly harder than what you’d see on the AP test, but they’re not going to require additional concepts,” Austin stated. “You can use the same techniques as you would on the AP exam, but chances are the entrance exam would require you to be a little more sneaky in how you use them.”
Given the obscure nature of the program at River Hill, Austin just had to seek out math teacher Jesse Childress to receive his nomination. However, Childress views this apparent nonselectivity as a positive, noting that the lack of awareness leads to a lot of self-selection, meaning “Hopkins knows we wouldn’t waste their time nominating someone who wasn’t serious about actually attending the program.” He notes that students who would succeed in the program would need the “level of maturity to make that drive out to Baltimore during rush hour,” and views the program as a strong fit for those already entrenched in mathematics, noting that the coursework “definitely is much more advanced than what we can offer here.”
Beyond the courses’ rigor, Hopkins’ status as an elite university offers participants in the Future Scholars program one-of-a-kind access to top-flight professors and researchers. One notable example is Austin’s current professor, Dr. Christopher Sogge, a prominent researcher and the editor of the American Journal of Mathematics, the oldest continuously published mathematics journal in the United States. Noting the value of this proximity, Austin stated that “it’s very cool to be able to learn from someone who is essentially at the peak of their craft… just seeing different ways to approach problems and having this consistent mindset of pushing yourself just grows you a lot.”
The student community further contributes to this aspect of the program. While Austin acknowledges that “it can definitely be a little hard to integrate at times” because “you are not a student there” properly, he found Hopkins to be welcoming overall. “The fact that you are a high schooler taking these courses already offers you a way to differentiate yourself,” he noted. “Although I was never really able to get close to them, they were still very friendly and willing to offer a helping hand.”