At 7:30 on an overcast winter morning, Linda Seymour brings a spark of light and life into a room full of St. Michaels’ Rotarians, skillfully holding their attention as she tells them about the sudden expansion of her world from the classrooms of St. Michaels High School to the laboratories of M.I.T.
She says that her first week at the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was “kind of intimidating” because she was in science classes with students who had years of advanced placement classes before they got to M.I.T.
“They already knew what we were being taught,” she says. But within a month, she says they were all on the same level because everyone was learning things that none of them had thought of before.
Now, after just three semesters in college, she is a teaching assistant helping incoming freshmen learn the nuances of the school.
The college has its own geek-speak language, she says. “We speak in numbers and acronyms.”
Linda, 18, graduated with honors from St. Michaels in 2010 and received a full-ride scholarship to M.I.T. where tuition, room and board costs $50,000 a year. She was also awarded one of the three $5,000 Rotary Scholarships given to St. Michaels High students that year. She was the guest speaker Tuesday at the St. Michaels Rotary’s weekly breakfast meeting at the Miles River Yacht Club.
With her bright smile and animated gestures, she described one of her college courses in advanced problem solving. The professor walked in the room and told them food security was a growing issue in a world of seven billion. “Solve the problem,” he told them and then walked out. Working in groups of three to five students, the class set on to find ways to save the world from starvation.
While other groups chose to examine how agriculture markets work and how water got to homes, she and her friends wrote and produced a 22-minute radio drama set in a village in India. The drama illustrates how to build diverse and sustainable agriculture in developing countries using native plants. Its theme is that people can learn to live on the land and produce their needs locally, rather than build corporate farms and exploit it.
She says she has been invited to work next semester in a lab that is experimenting with how heterogeneous materials, such as concrete, break. “We get to make things and put them in a cool smashing machine and break things,” she says with an excited grin.
Another facet of her education has been the opportunity to study with internationally recognized experts. “It is cool to know that your professor is a Nobel Laureate,” she says.
Looking back at her high school years, she says that her math teacher, Christine Pridgen, was instrumental in helping her get to M.I.T. She says the calculus she learned from Pridgen at St. Michaels has helped her maintain a 5.0 college grade-point average.
She says she loves the view from her dorm room window overlooking the Charles River and the skyline of tall buildings but she is glad to be home for the holiday break to spend time with her family at their home on Pea Neck Road.
“I really miss being able to see the stars and the deer and the geese,” she says.
To listen to Linda’s radio drama, click here.
Shar McBee says
Linda’s presentation left me uplifted, inspired and enormously hopeful about the future. Even though her classes are incredibly challenging, her joyous mood is infectious. Acquiring new knowledge and solving world challenges for Linda is clearly a stimulating and exciting thing she shares with other students and friends. Thanks for letting us have a peek at your fun!