Where our world can unite
Exclamation points abound when Seanna Pieper-Jordan talks about almost anything. But ask about her participation in the 2007 Summer Student Program at The Jackson Laboratory, and the floodgates open: “It was a wonderful and life-changing experience! It ignited within me an ever-burning passion for science!”
For Seanna, 18, a high school senior in Honolulu, the distance to Bar Harbor last summer was measured in more than miles. Raised by a single mother on the Blackfoot reservation in Montana and now living with a foster family in her native Hawaii, this remarkable teenager is pursuing an uncommon dream for someone of her ethnic heritage and challenging background.
“What can I say? I am one of the few Native Hawaiian/Native Americans looking at a future career in biological sciences,” she says. “I grew up in an environment that one would assume would doom me to the common statistics of natives: poverty and drug abuse. But somehow as a child I knew I wanted more in life than minimal education and a string of dead-end jobs.”
Her application to the Summer Student Program was encouraged by science teachers at the Kamehameha High School, part of a renowned system of private schools on the Islands founded and endowed by a descendant of Hawaiian royalty to educate native children. Seanna, who boards at the highly selective school on full scholarship, says her summer internship at the Laboratory was viewed back home “as a way to improve the science program at Kamehameha and to expand the opportunities for Native Hawaiian children who love science.”
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