When I think back to my wonder years as a middle school student, some of my fondest memories were those made on field trips to Orchestra Hall for the Sphinx Competition or to the ISKCON Temple of Detroit. Getting out of class, leaving the school and traveling to a new destination was always exciting to me because these adventures allowed me to discover something new.

As part of my role as the Operations Coordinator at the University YES Academy, I have worked as a chaperone for field trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts and the University of Michigan. The core of the University YES Academy’s mission is to close the achievement gap by providing an academic environment that prepares Detroit’s young scholars for four-year colleges or universities. UYA’s rigorous curriculum paired with experiential learning supports and motivates our students to achieve academic success.

Guiding the UYA scholars through their enriched experiences outside of the school campus certainly helps me see the impact University YES Academy has in the lives of our scholars. Educating Detroit’s youth is not only about bottom line test results, but it’s also about creating an education system that embraces qualitative and quantitative measures of achievement. In Detroit, those meaningful interactions a student makes with the DIA’s Hale Woodruff painting Ancestral Memory or their first step in the U of M undergraduate library are steps toward building a better education system for our youth. As a Challenge Detroit Fellow, I am grateful that I have the chance to be apart of a work community that strives to be a positive agent of change in Detroit’s education system.

UYA Scholars at the University Of Michigan