At their high school graduation ceremony on May 30, 2024, SLI scholars Isabella and Paula were recognized as among the top 10 of their graduating class of 206 students.
Isabella was ranked 4th, with a GPA of 4.60. She will study political science and pre-law to become an attorney, an interest that was already developing early in her high school career.
“Something that I’ll miss about SLI is the friendships that I made along the way, as well as all the mentorship and all of the support that I received through Dr. Kaufman and various people within the program,” she said in a recent interview.
Paula, who was ranked 9th, had a GPA of 4.31. She will study biology and pre-medicine, to become a nurse.
As a high school sophomore, she called SLI “a life changer,” and this spring she shared this advice for students following in her footsteps: “I would recommend actually trying on your essays [in SLI Early College] because as time goes by you can look back at your old essays and then you can see how much you’ve improved.”
SLI is generously funded by the Herndon Foundation, the SLI Founder’s Fund, and many others in the SLI Community of Support. Programming is led by SLI founder Peter Iver Kaufman, Ph.D., a professor at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, and her school’s LIEP teacher & department chair Ester Orellana.
