3 Years In, Math Initiative Creates a Path from Newark High Schools to NJIT

Three years in, NJIT’s Math Success Initiative continues to grow in participation and results.

Designed to prime Newark high school students for college, the summer-to-spring program attracted 29 students in 2021-22, up 26% from 2019-20, according to Levelle Burr-Alexander, director of special projects at NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs, which co-administers MSI with the university’s College of Science and Liberal Arts. And within the current cohort, all but one of the participants earned acceptance into NJIT.

Many of the students have other options and it’s still too early to confirm final enrollment for fall 2022. But the majority of the group is expected to head to University Heights. In the first two years of the program, a total of 33 Newark residents became first-year Highlanders.

Classes and college prep

Enrollment is not the only goal of MSI, however. Professors, administrators and counselors also aim to spark interest in math and more broadly, attending college.

For the former, students attend classes on campus, and for the latter, they get weekly college prep sessions. A recent one featured an NJIT Public Safety sergeant talking about the perils of sharing personal information on social media.

MSI is central to NJIT’s cultivation of its home city of Newark — one of the core missions of the university. Other programs include the federally funded Forensic Science Initiative and the Paul V. Profeta Foundation Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which offers paid fellowships and a startup studio for Newark residents. Both were unveiled last year.

While MSI helps NJIT fulfill a broader goal of raising the economic tide for Newark and its underserved residents — particularly minorities and women — participants appreciate something more elemental: the one-to-one connections you make in the classroom, with either professors or classmates.

Rising to the challenge

Nagoziem Raymond Ezike, a senior at West Side High School who has set his sights on working as a physical therapist or conditioner in the NBA, learned the finer points of pre-calculus from University Lecturer Peter Ward. “It’s difficult,” Ezike said, “but he knows how to cut it down to the basics.”

It also helps to be in a class where “everybody knows each other,” Ezike said.

Kaily Peixoto, a senior at Technology High School interested in STEM, had a different instructor for the same course — University Lecturer Donivyn Schmidt — but similar praise. “She’s engaging and she asks us questions,” Peixoto said. “And then she’ll help us with examples.”

Peixoto is among the MSIers who plan to attend NJIT, which she described as a challenging university. Of course, that made earning admission even more sweet. As she put it, “It felt pretty good.”