Ask any MIT student why they came to Cambridge, and you’ll probably hear a few common themes: a favorite science teacher, an interest in computers that turned into an obsession, a bedroom decorated with NASA posters and glow-in-the-dark stars.
But for a select few, the road to MIT begins with an invitation to a special summer program. This isn’t a camp with canoes and cabins and campsites, but a program where classrooms and labs discuss Arduino, variable range and sawtooth waves, and Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics. The classrooms and labs are at the University of the West Indies’ Cave Hill campus in Barbados, and the students are all talented Caribbean high school students, ages 16-18, who have been selected to participate in the highly competitive Student Program in Science, Engineering, and Innovation (SPISE). Their summer doesn’t have much time for recreation or sleep. Instead, they will tackle an intensive five-week curriculum in which they take college-level courses in calculus, physics, biochemistry, computer programming, electronics, and entrepreneurship, with the final three courses involving hands-on projects. For some current students, SPISE was their gateway to MIT.
“The bigger picture is much bigger,” said Cardinal Ward, a native of Barbados in the Caribbean, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and founder of SPISE. “In the past 10 years, exactly 30 of the SPISE program’s 245 students have attended MIT as undergraduates or graduate students.”
While many SPISE graduates go on to prestigious schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, the school’s emphasis on science and technology provided a natural path to MIT, where faculty and instructors volunteer their time and expertise to help Ward design a challenging and engaging curriculum.
Jacob White, Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering, was one of the first volunteers. “When the COVID-19 pandemic forced SPISE to move to remote classes, Professor Ward felt it was important to continue the hands-on engineering lab and asked me to help,” White explains. “The kits are assembled using microcontroller boards, motors and magnets donated by EECS. Dina Sarr (SPISE director) has been distributing these kits to students on six islands.” White and several of his graduate students worked together to create a curriculum that would give students enough foundational knowledge to create their own designs.
As SPISE returned to in-person classes, Steve Leeb, the Emanuel E. Landsman Professor (1958) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics Engineering (RLE), realized the challenges of teaching electronics remotely.
“SPISE is exactly the opportunity we were looking for in RLE’s educational outreach program: a community of bright, enthusiastic young people who will benefit from a new perspective on science and engineering, who will bring new perspectives, share their energy and excitement, and ideally forge lifelong connections to MIT’s academic programs.” “It was a natural combination that benefited all of us,” said Leeb, who is working with graduate students to pioneer the mobile “take-home” FIRST Electronics curriculum at MIT and teaches the 6.2030 course. “The FIRST Electronics labs and lectures are designed to connect electronic circuitry technologies that are recognizable as components in commercial products — digital gates, microcontrollers, and other electronic technologies,” Leeb said. “So the projects get students working on building components that naturally lead to commercial products and product ideas. This naturally leads to the ‘final projects’ that students create in SPISE — products of their own ideas, such as music synthesizers.”
Importantly, the curriculum hasn’t been streamlined for high school students. “We’ve adapted the projects to fit the length of different programs; SPISE is shorter than a semester at MIT,” Leeb says. “We haven’t made the activities less rigorous or challenging, but rather we’ve brought new ideas from SPISE students back to our schools to improve 6.2030.”
Faculty outside of EECS have also contributed to the development of SPISE, with major teaching contributions coming from the Department of Physics, where Lecturer Alex Shubonsky, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Caleb Bonyun, and Senior Lecturer in Engineering Joshua Wolf, who also manages the Physics Education Resource Lab, have collaborated on hands-on projects and teaching in both Physics I and Calculus I. Additional resources came from MIT’s Sea Grant program, which provided underwater robots for six consecutive years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic to SPISE. (Post-pandemic, the program has shifted its focus to embedded systems.)
But SPISE’s central inspiration didn’t come from any academic department. “SPISE is based on a proven model: MITES,” explains Ebony Hahn, executive director of Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science at MIT. “The program provides talented high school students from every zip code with access and opportunity to intensive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, and for nearly 50 years has helped thousands of students gain admission to top universities and pursue successful careers in STEM fields while immersed in a community of dedicated mentors and professional leaders.”
It’s no coincidence that the two shows share DNA. Cardinal Ward has been dean of MITES for the past 27 years, and when envisioning a similar program in the Caribbean, he drew on lessons from 50 years of transformative pre-college experiences. Like MITES, SPISE encourages participants to develop a sense of belonging in STEM and envision possibilities at top schools. Over the years, the program has added sessions with admissions officers from MIT, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. “SPISE changed the way I see myself,” says Chenise Harper, a freshman at MIT who is currently interested in course 6-5 (Computer-Based Electronics Engineering). “It gave me the confidence to apply to colleges that I never thought were within my reach.”
Harper’s trajectory is exactly what the program’s designers had hoped for. “We have very successfully achieved our short-term goal of increasing the number of Caribbean students pursuing advanced degrees in STEM and developing the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the region,” said Program Director Dina Sarr (Class of 1981, wife of Cardinal Ward). “Our SPISE alumni include those who have completed or are pursuing graduate degrees at top universities around the world, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, as well as Rhodes Scholars. We strongly believe that SPISE graduates represent some of the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the Caribbean, and that SPISE has played a key role in setting their paths.”
Notably, the SPISE program also includes an entrepreneurship component, encouraging students to envision technology-based solutions to problems around them. Keona Simon from St. Louis, John F. Kennedy, representing St. Vincent and the Grenadines, along with other SPISE participants, created a business presentation on an innovative “vending machine.” “In the Caribbean, tourism contributes greatly to the economy, but waste dumping is a problem that diminishes the beauty of the islands and harms the abundant marine life,” explains Simon, a junior currently majoring in Course 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology). “Our project aims to address this issue by installing recycling machines in areas with high air pollution. People can deposit recyclable plastic bottles, and the machine will convert the weight of the plastic into cash rewards on a card that can be used for discounts at supermarkets.”
Former SPISE student Quilee Simeon decided to work on renewable energy systems at SPISE as a way to address the impacts of global warming on her hometown of St. Louis. My Lucia: “I chose to work on the renewable energy project, designing and building a wind turbine prototype using low-resource materials like PVC pipes. “This is really interesting because I think it could have practical applications for a developing island nation like ours, which is disproportionately affected by climate change because we don’t have as many of the manufacturing materials that larger countries have,” Simeon said. “So in my mind, building a renewable energy source that’s cheap and efficient is an important problem to solve.”
As Simeon worked on the prototype turbine and studied late into the night with his new SPISE classmates, he realized how different this experience was from his previous education. For most students, the summer program is their first opportunity to spend time away from home. But for all of them, it’s their first time experiencing the tornado of working through multiple college-level courses while simultaneously juggling assignments and quizzes. “It was honestly my introduction to MIT,” Simeon says. “Not only did they give us rigorous math and science assignments, but they also provided college application guidance and explained the enormous opportunities that a STEM degree could bring. SPISE changed how I see myself as an academic, in perhaps unexpected ways. Before SPISE, I thought I was smart, but it made me realize how much I didn’t know and how much the style of education I was used to (rote memorization, memorization, etc.) was missing or flawed. SPISE helped me realize that being an academic isn’t just about acquiring knowledge, it’s about creating and applying that knowledge.”
Sarr maintains that the difficulty of the SPISE curriculum is an intentional choice to prepare students for higher education: “When we started SPISE in 2012, we decided to focus on teaching the fundamentals in each course…Homework and exams require students to apply those fundamentals to solve difficult problems. This is in stark contrast to the way these students typically learn, which is by memorizing facts. So this is really a very intentional choice and an important change that we want to bring about in these very high potential students’ approaches to learning and thinking.”
MIT’s emphasis on creative and unconventional thinking is just the beginning of the culture shock that awaits SPISE students who transfer from the summer program to U.S. universities. Many are surprised by the American habit of calling professors by their first names, which is considered rude in their home countries. Conversely, everyday interactions in the Northeast may seem distant and cold to Caribbean students. “Moving from a small island with a population of only 100,000 to Harvard was initially unsettling,” says Gerald Porter, who joined SPISE in 2017 before earning his bachelor’s degree at Harvard. “During my first year, I often received strange looks when I said hello to strangers in the elevator or to students I didn’t know in my dorm. I quickly realized that politeness means something completely different in the Northeast than it does in the warm Caribbean.”
Other SPISE alumni shared similar chills they literally felt. For Kyrie Simeon, her first winter in Cambridge was miserable. “I knew the concept of winter and I was told to prepare for the cold, but I didn’t realize how cold it was until I experienced it,” Simeon said. “It’s awful!” Ronald Lee, a freshman from Jamaica interested in computer science and electrical engineering, found warm interactions with other SPISE alumni at MIT. “Nothing beats tropical weather! But honestly, the community at MIT is amazing. I was surprised at how quickly I felt at home thanks to the amazing people around me. The Black and Caribbean community in particular made me feel at home. I met some really fascinating, motivated, like-minded people and became some of my best friends. One of the biggest surprises was realizing that even though we come from different cultural backgrounds, we’re all so similar. Everyone here is incredibly smart and has a common drive to make the world better and pursue exciting STEM projects.”
This shared drive to improve the world through STEM is evident in the paths that SPISE graduates have taken.
Currently, Gerald Porter, a graduate student in the Keessling group in the MIT Chemistry Department, is working on research “focused on elucidating the biological role of the glycans that cover every cell on Earth. I’m working on developing chemical tools to study important areas of the bacterial cell wall that remain largely unexplored.” Porter hopes that learning more about the molecular mechanisms at work inside the cell wall will pave the way for the development of new antibiotics.
Quilee Simeon has found a strong connection with computational neuroscience and is currently developing a computational model of the C. elegans nervous system . “I hope that this biological model will be useful not only for biology but also for computational neuroscience research,” said Simeon, who plans to work in industry after graduation.
Computational biology has caught the attention of third-year student Keonna Simon, who is excited to take courses such as 6.8711 (Computational Systems Biology: Deep Learning in the Life Sciences), noting, “This connection holds great potential for solving complex biological problems through computational methods, and I am excited to learn more about this field.”
Chenise Harper is inspired by SPISE’s focus on bringing tech entrepreneurship to the country. “My life in the Caribbean inspired me to dream of a future where robots help rebuild communities after natural disasters,” she said. “There are many issues I would like to contribute to one day, like climate change and cybersecurity. Electrical and Computer Engineering is a major that will at least expose me to the areas I’m interested in, allow me to explore concepts in both software and hardware that excite me, and give me the opportunity to develop tangible ways to give back to the community that helped get me to where I am today.”
Ronald Li also has an academic base in computer science and electrical engineering, where he fabricated and characterized perovskite solar cells as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project and built a small offshore wind turbine for the Collegiate Wind Energy Competition as a member of the MIT WIND team. “I want to focus on the energy sector, specifically improving the power grid system and integrating renewable energy sources to ensure more reliable access,” Li said. “I want to make access to energy more sustainable and inclusive, stimulating growth throughout the region.”
Lee’s plans align perfectly with the long-term goals Ward and Sarr set out when they planned SPISE. “It will take time to diversify the region’s economy and improve living standards by promoting technology-driven entrepreneurship,” Sarr said. “We are optimistic that SPISE graduates will, over time, change the world and make it a better place for everyone, including the Caribbean.”
