SALEM — The LEAP for Education Summer Work program’s gallery walk showcased the talent and intelligence of 100 students at Salem State University’s South Campus on Thursday.
Of the 50 students from Lynn who participated in the program, three students also had the opportunity to present for Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll and state Reps Dan Cahill and Manny Cruz.
The LEAP for Education Summer Work program recruits high-school students from Lynn and Salem to participate in a 20-hour paid work week. Students are paired with a mentor from a field that matches their interests after taking a career-interests quiz.
During the six-week program, students participate in career-readiness and financial-literacy workshops, hear from professionals in different fields, participate in college fairs, and ultimately complete a project that challenges them to display skills they learned in the field they are interested in.
LEAP Director of High School and Post-Secondary Programs Elizabeth Grella said the program this year “was overall extremely successful.”
“I think the projects are a testament to how serious the kids were taking it, and how much creativity and depth and effort they put into these projects,” Grella said.
Liam Garcia, a rising freshman at Frederick Douglass Collegiate Academy, said he wants to be an architect like his father. He built a bridge with rulers and popsicle sticks with the goal of testing its strength with weights. The bridge ultimately broke at 51.8 pounds.
He added that he wants to become an architect because the only thing that limits an architect’s creativity is their brain.
Garcia’s mentor was Reed Brockman, a civil engineer at AECOM who also heads a bridge-building competition for fifth-graders through high-school seniors.
“You can tell he really loves what he’s doing,” Brockman said. “You can just tell he’s going to stick with it.”
Carla Rodriguez, a rising freshman at Lynn Tech, created a model for a robot designed to clean the bottom of the sea for her project.
She said she has had the idea of creating the robot for a long time, and thought this project was the perfect opportunity for her to pursue the idea.
Rodriguez also created a simulation of what the robot would look like if it were submerged in water, cleaning the ocean.
Alex Gonzalez, a rising junior at Lynn English High School, said he would definitely do the program again next year.
“I’m always confident when I’m in this building,” he said.
Gonzalez focused his project on how to become a software engineer. He taught his peers and legislators what colleges offer the best computer-science programs and what the salary range for a software engineer is.
He said he wanted to encourage his peers to “always smile and always remember that they are not useless.”
