Is a Celebrated STEM Program Engaged in Hazing?

The University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program is renowned nationally as a promising solution to a persistent crisis of minority underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and math.

The program has propelled hundreds of Black UMBC students to earn Ph.D.s in STEM disciplines and helped make the university one of the nation’s top producers of Black graduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s and M.D.s in these fields. Famous alums include a surgeon general and a scientist who helped create a Covid vaccine. At least five colleges have spun off their own versions.

But a Chronicle investigation found that the grueling six-week summer boot camp that sets the tone for the Meyerhoff program has provoked both praise and outrage from students and alumni.

For some, the mandated “summer bridge program” is a highlight of their college experience — one that shaped their careers, helped them bond with future colleagues, and taught them essential life lessons. Echoing the vision of Freeman Hrabowski, Meyerhoff’s founder and UMBC’s former president, they say it’s prepared them for a demanding field that hasn’t always made space for Black people.

For others, the six-week introduction to Meyerhoff borders on abusive. The academic rigor causes sleep deprivation and overwhelming stress, they say, and the professional-development and team-bonding activities include arbitrary rules with strange, at times demeaning consequences if broken. Even some alums who credit successful careers partly to Meyerhoff say the benefits of summer bridge are outweighed by the trauma they say they experienced that summer.

“I don’t want to tarnish a good thing, an important thing,” said one alum. “But I can’t shake the fact that it doesn’t feel OK how they’re doing that.”

In order to better understand what happens in the Meyerhoff program, Chronicle reporters interviewed more than a dozen current and former students, counselors, and administrators, and reviewed dozens of pages of documents and rules obtained through open-records requests. Some people, like the alum quoted above, insisted on anonymity because of potential career ramifications for criticizing a popular and influential STEM-education program. We also combed through dozens of online comments on social media from current and prospective students.

Among The Chronicle’s findings:

• Students move together as a group, usually in tight lines, and are told to keep their doors open most of the time and stay off their cellphones to maintain close connections with their peers. They aren’t allowed to walk on grass or use elevators.
• Classes, professional-development workshops, and study sessions stretch from early morning until late in the evening, causing students to complain of sleep deprivation. Evening meetings frequently devolve into shouting matches and crying.
• If one student shows up a few minutes late for class or violates the program’s strict policy against social media, everyone is disciplined.
• Officials at colleges that replicated the program have scrapped some of the strictest rules, which some of them have likened to fraternity or sorority hazing.
• The rules, meant to teach students about leadership and teamwork, date to at least the early 2000s and continue up to the current class.
• Many of the rules were codified into training for counselors and staff members, who were instructed to use the term “corrections” instead of “punishment.”

The end of affirmative action and this year’s unrelenting political attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have many administrators asking how best to recruit and retain students of color, particularly at institutions and in majors that were once almost exclusively white.

In many ways, Meyerhoff’s methods stand in stark contrast to those that surround vulnerable students on other college campuses: providing them with intensive supports and removing barriers that stand in their way.

Meyerhoff manufactures stressful situations to fortify students for the battle ahead. (Program leaders stress that students are supported by mentors and advisers who help keep them from cracking.)

UMBC’s current president, Valerie Sheares Ashby, learned about the Meyerhoff program more than a decade ago, when she chaired the department of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her chancellor, Holden Thorp, asked her to help replicate the program at Chapel Hill. Her own experience, as a 17-year-old attending a summer research program for Black students at Chapel Hill, is what helped her survive in a field so many scholars of color drop out of, she said.

“For underrepresented students, you have to be better. You have to be faster. You have to be stronger,” she told The Chronicle. “You have to be more of everything else to be seen as equal. When you’re on time, you’re late. That’s a cultural thing my mother taught me when I was 9.”

Students will be exhausted and want to drop out of Ph.D. programs, and many will, she said. “When you’re the only person of color in that Ph.D. space, no one’s going to save you. It’s hard to create knowledge.” What programs like Meyerhoff tell students is, “I need you to practice that in my presence where I can care for you and put you back in the game.” All the rigor, she said, “helps you understand whether you want to make this commitment” to earning a Ph.D.

Asked whether some of the rules go too far, Ashby said that she doesn’t recall the specifics of how group punishments were meted out at Chapel Hill, where a spinoff program began in 2013, but that “it wouldn’t surprise me” if that happened. Cohorts need to rely on their members, and one irresponsible person can ruin not only the science but the reputation of the team, she said.

It’s easy to dismiss these extremes as either coddling or traumatizing students. But finding an effective balance is tricky.

The fact that summer bridge is described as both traumatic and transformative points to a central question: Is its regimented approach necessary to diversify the STEM field?

Rae Adjogah, who graduated from UMBC in 2013, learned about Meyerhoff from her high-school calculus teacher, who had also completed the program. She was interested in science and was drawn to the mentorship opportunities in Meyerhoff, as well as the generous four-year scholarships.

Going in, Adjogah was unsure what to expect. She’d attended an introduction weekend in the spring of her senior year of high school, where she met other prospective members of her class, as well as older scholars. “The vibe was a little bit weird” that weekend, she said, remembering a large party she was required to attend that made it difficult to wake up for an early morning interview the next day. When she found out a few weeks later that she’d been selected for the 21st Meyerhoff cohort, though, she was excited about the near-full-ride scholarship she’d receive.

During summer bridge, Adjogah said, things only got stranger. Her cohort had to move as a unit and always in a straight line around campus. The late nights studying followed by mandatory meetings early in the morning made it challenging to be on time, but the whole group was penalized for one person’s lateness. The staff and counselors, who enforced the rules, told students that the cohort was their family and that they were responsible for one another’s actions. They reminded Adjogah of drill sergeants.

“It’s like a Black super-scientist grooming program,” she said. “Emphasis on the grooming part.”

UMBC designed that grooming to solve a widely recognized pipeline problem. The university has long been recognized for both its academics and its mission to help underrepresented students succeed in STEM. When Hrabowski became vice provost in 1987, his goal was to put the university on the map by proving that Black students, particularly Black men, could earn Ph.D.s in white-dominated fields. He’s won accolades for his success.

“We were looking at retention rates of underserved students at the university,” said Earnestine Baker, who attended Hampton University with Hrabowski and helped develop the program. “These were students who were very capable and were accepted into the university. We expected high achievement and we noticed that that wasn’t happening.”

Many had excelled in high school by working on their own but would begin to doubt their abilities in college, where few students who looked like them were standouts in the university’s most rigorous courses.

Meyerhoff’s founders wanted to develop a challenging summer bridge program that would lay the groundwork for a cohesive, supportive community of scholars of color. They believed it needed an intensive schedule in which students were stressed and lifted each other up, the kind of approach no one questions, Baker said, when it’s football or golf players being prepped for the season.

“When it’s the life of the mind, why is that so hard? We didn’t look at it from a negative perspective, that they’re going to be tired,” she said.

With financial support from Robert Meyerhoff, a billionaire philanthropist, and his wife, Jane, the program began in 1988, enrolling its first cohort of 19 Black men the next year. In its second year, Meyerhoff expanded to include Black women and eventually to students of all backgrounds who are interested in advancing minority opportunities in science and engineering. (The 2022 freshman class is made up of 30 Black students, seven Asian students, three Hispanic students, six white students, and five students who identify as more than one race.)

Hrabowski drew inspiration for summer bridge from Upward Bound, a federally funded program in which high-school students can take classes in the summer for college credit. The goal was to connect students with one another as well as with faculty members.

“It takes researchers to produce researchers, it takes scientists to produce scientists,” Hrabowski said. “We needed much more connecting between the students and the faculty.”

STEM education requires strong foundations in math and science, and often involves extensive labs and heavy workloads. Studies have shown that nearly half of the students who start out in STEM majors either switch to something else or drop out.

Though Hrabowski said he hadn’t heard of some of the more arbitrary rules in summer bridge — like the ban on using elevators or walking on grass — he said it was likely they emerged as the program developed, with counselors and staff creating new “traditions.”

“Anytime you have a community of people from any race, age, they will develop traditions. They connect people in different ways,” said Hrabowski. “The substantive piece of Meyerhoff is excellence in the academic work coupled with behavior that is selfless. That you’re doing this not just for the money but because you want to help people.”

Getting into the Meyerhoff program is highly competitive. In the spring, around 150 to 200 top applicants are invited to campus for “selection weekend,” where they’ll be interviewed and hear program pitches from Meyerhoff students, staff, and alumni. “We want to put our program and our values on display,” said Keith Harmon, the current director. “We never want to do a ‘bait and switch.’ We want you to understand who we are.”

Other administrators also said they’re upfront with students about what to expect — at least in general terms.

“When parents and students come in for selection weekend, they’re informed what the program is about and how tough summer bridge is,” said Michael Summers, a professor of biochemistry at UMBC who’s been closely involved with the program since 1993 as an instructor, lab supervisor, and mentor. “None of it comes as a surprise. They understand there are consequences when people don’t conform.”

A Meyerhoff student who just finished her freshman year in the program said she was excited but apprehensive when she was invited to selection weekend. She began combing social-media sites for more information. On Reddit, she found both glowing praise and scary warnings. “I was a little worried because there was all kinds of crazy stuff — horror stories about yelling and group punishments and a class where the lowest grade in the class was everyone’s grade.”

Now a rising sophomore, she insisted on anonymity because she feared being singled out by staff members for calling attention to controversial rules in a program that, over all, she supports.

Even during selection weekend, older Meyerhoffs watch applicants interact at a social event, a way to “weed out” candidates who “couldn’t act right for a single night,” said Rocky Sison, a Meyerhoff alum who graduated in 2013 and was a summer bridge counselor. Pluses for socializing and keeping the noise level down; minuses for talking about drinking, smoking, or cheating or for sneaking out to meet up with friends. Prospects are encouraged to talk about their high-school accomplishments. A UMBC spokesperson said personal habits like drinking or smoking would never be used as admissions factors.

A number of students told The Chronicle the rules and rigor of the program caught them by surprise.

Making the cut is a huge honor. This year’s cohort of 68 students was culled from more than 600 applicants. They receive merit-based four-year scholarships of up to $15,000 per year for in-state students and $22,000 for out-of-state students. They must maintain a GPA of 3.0 — and the grading begins even before their freshman fall, during the six-week summer bridge.

Counselors try to immerse students in an experience similar to what they’ll face as full-time STEM students, according to training material.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, students attend two classes in humanities and math. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they attend seminars and noncredit workshops in chemistry, computing, and engineering. Students learn the steps to enroll in a Ph.D. program, how to develop a CV, and how to write a professional email. On Thursdays, they also visit prospective employers like NASA, the National Institute of Health, or the Johns Hopkins University.

The entire cohort is required to arrive 15 minutes early to all events, including meals. A popular mantra during bridge is “To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late is unacceptable.” If anyone is late, the cohort must report 15 minutes earlier the following day. If they continue to arrive late, the report time moves up in 15-minute increments. The “correction” penalty won’t ever exceed an hour.

If students go somewhere without the whole group, they must be accompanied by at least one or two other Meyerhoffs — unless they are going to the bathroom or the staff members make an exception. “We weren’t allowed to go anywhere alone,” the rising sophomore said. As an introvert, she found that hard.

Some rules for summer bridge have changed slightly since the early years. Until the 2010s, students were expected to follow strict gender rules, such as men holding doors for women or allowing women to enter a room first. Now, students are elected as “group leaders” to take on this task. Harmon said this ensures all students have their materials for the day, are on time, and stay together. Otherwise there could be consequences.

“It’s helping people understand that we’re in this together,” Harmon said. “It’s not just that ‘Keith didn’t do his work, he’s on his own.’” Students learn that when they help one another, they succeed together.

If even one student steps out of line, the entire cohort faces consequences. That Reddit story about everyone sharing their classmate’s low grade? It’s true, Harmon said. The professor, who teaches math, is no longer involved in bridge, Harmon said, but the method was especially effective in getting students to study and rely on each other.

Some students struggle with the lack of privacy during bridge. Adjogah, the Meyerhoff alum who graduated in 2013, is autistic and has ADHD. She often had to push through sensory discomfort without the private time she said she needed to calm down. “It’s boot camp really — there’s no privacy, no real ability to escape anywhere and have downtime,” she said.

After a day packed with activities, some will be up studying until the early hours of the morning. The rules specify that students need to be “awake and alert” in class, but no reaching for the Red Bull. Energy drinks are forbidden. Instead, students have resorted to other methods that are passed down between cohorts.

“In class, we’d pass around mints to stay awake,” the rising sophomore said. “We’d all be kind of surveying the area, and if this person’s falling asleep, someone would nudge them.”

Others wrote that they wore rubber bands around their wrists to snap when they started to nod off. Otherwise they might get in trouble for falling asleep in class. “It’s a mind-fuck,” Adjogah said. “The main thing you think of is just following the rules and not falling asleep.”

A staff handbook obtained by The Chronicle presents counselors with hypotheticals for discussion that acknowledge the impact of days that begin with breakfast at 7 a.m. and sometimes stretch past midnight. In each, they’re asked what they would do.

In one prompt, staff members are asked to imagine it is the third week of summer bridge and “midterms are right around the corner.” “The Math 150 Class has their normal study session from 8 to 11 p.m. but decide they need more time. The class decides to stay up until 1 a.m. to get all of their work done,” the prompt says. “One or two students in the class don’t think they should stay up because being sleepy for class does not help in the long run. Several of the students go to bed instead of staying up.”

In another, with midterms in calculus and psychology fast approaching, students are “distraught,” and their leaders help them come up with a “mission plan” for the week. “As the evening goes on you are receiving knocks at the door with desperate members of the cohort that do not agree with their leader’s mission,” the prompt says. “They are crying and letting you know that their world is crumbling right in front of them, and they can’t do anything about it.”

Harmon, the program director, said the staff has started to provide more time for students to relax and unwind. Students now have some unstructured time in the evenings when they can catch up on homework, go to the gym, or take some time to themselves, Harmon said. They also have evening study halls. On Saturdays, students participate in local service projects and team-bonding activities, and there’s a one-time trip to an amusement park. Much of their Sundays, students told The Chronicle, are spent catching up on sleep.

The stress and the lack of sleep prepares students for the long hours and demanding curriculum of the field they’re about to enter, Harmon said. “In some ways, we’re trying to give them a glimpse of what’s coming,” without, he said, being “overburdensome.”

The rules, including cellphone restrictions, keep students from slipping up. If they are caught using their phones during unauthorized hours, they could progressively lose access to them. “It got worse later on as we kept breaking the rules,” the rising sophomore remembers. “Eventually, we were only allowed on cellphones after 11 p.m. My mom would message me at 11 on the dot asking, ‘Are you OK?’”

Last year, students were also banned from social media during the week, according to the rules obtained by The Chronicle. “We were allowed on our computers in our rooms, but eventually, they didn’t trust us anymore,” the rising sophomore said, because the counselors thought the scholars were visiting social-media or other unapproved sites. For a while, they could use their computers only in common lounges and if counselors were available to supervise.

Asked how anyone would know if they were sneaking a peek at Facebook or Instagram, she referred back to the open-door policy. The counselors, she said, were walking around checking on them. “There was a rumor that one of the advisers could see our screens through the internet,” she added. “We were probably just being paranoid.”

A woman who graduated in 2020 remembers a student in her cohort posting an image on social media when they arrived for summer bridge. A few hours after students had moved into their dorms and said goodbye to their parents, counselors summoned the students and told them someone in their cohort had already broken the rules, the alum said. As a “restorative activity,” everyone had to write a multipage essay about the incident and the importance of following the rules.

Starting this summer, students will be allowed to use social media after 9 p.m., a UMBC spokesperson said. The change was approved this spring since many students use apps to take care of their mental health.

The conflicted Meyerhoff alum who was reluctant to “tarnish a good thing” said the most difficult part of bridge was the humiliation.

Counselors, who are the main enforcers of the rules, often single out students who slip up. During study halls, for example, if a student broke for a moment from work, the counselors would yell at the entire cohort after the session was over, the alum said. “They would just lose their minds and scream.”

Adjogah recalls similar scenes. “The mental image is counselors who were also Meyerhoffs that went through it a few years before yelling at 50 sleep-deprived kids who were all wearing matching clothes and walking in single-file lines,” Adjogah said.

(A UMBC spokesperson said that walking in straight lines allows the group to move around campus easily without being in other people’s way.)

Some counselors have gotten creative with consequences. After a student in the 2020 graduate’s cohort violated the open-door rule, she said they removed all the furniture from the student’s room. And twice, counselors covered every surface of a student’s room in sticky notes. “It must’ve taken them hours,” the student said. “I don’t know how they had the time.”

Walter M. Kimbrough, a former president of Dillard University who’s written a book about hazing in Black fraternities, said that some of the more controversial summer bridge rules, including group punishments for missteps and walking in lines, remind him of practices pledges in Black fraternities and sororities faced before 1990. “It is interesting that they are still doing this because the groups outlawed it due to hazing,” he wrote in an email. “I don’t know if this is not viewed as hazing because it is a university-sponsored program. If this were simply a student group, this would be viewed as hazing.”

When asked to confirm “corrections” like the ones the 2020 graduate saw, a UMBC spokesperson declined, saying, “We cannot comment about individual students or their individual experiences.”

While many students feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the summer bridge program, dropping out would mean losing four years of partial or whole tuition and housing. Adjogah said most of her peers couldn’t afford that, but she remembers some dropping out. “The whole ‘you drop out, you lose everything’ element really contributes to the insular cult vibe,” Adjogah said. “People just disappear and then you don’t really talk to them again.”

Daniel Ocasio, who graduated as a Meyerhoff scholar in 2017, remembers the counselors telling students during summer bridge that if they continued to break rules they would be kicked out of the program. The anonymous alum remembers similar threats.

“It’s fear tactics for sure. Get people in line,” Ocasio said. “I remember that infuriating me because here are people who most likely had other options for schools to attend but they chose the school for this program, for the financial support of it, and they threaten to take it away for something so silly.”

An “overwhelming majority” of students who leave bridge and remain at UMBC still receive a UMBC merit scholarship, a spokesperson said. This happens once every two to three years, she said.

But many alumni who’ve made it through the Meyerhoff program look back with gratitude at the six-week introduction. “Summer bridge was an intense experience and the way that they were giving boundaries and putting challenges in front of us just really worked for me,” said Sison, the 2013 alum who returned to work as a counselor. “For some people summer bridge doesn’t work for them. For me, that was one of the best summers I’ve ever had.”

The rising sophomore remembers “family meetings” held every evening where “80 percent of the room was crying and falling apart.” It is “very much like trauma bonding,” but, she says, “it works. We’re very close now.”

The benefits carried over in other ways. Throughout their years in the program, Meyerhoff scholars are required to sit in the front rows of their classrooms, to show up early for class, and to ask questions. The effects rub off not only on the scholars, who continue to study in groups, but on others who see high-achieving minority classmates actively engaged in the class, program administrators say.

And student and staff proponents of summer bridge say the highly regimented and cohesive environment is particularly effective in providing students of color with the confidence and skills they need to succeed. “The most important thing is it builds a sense of community and teaches them what it takes to do well at the college level,” said Summers, the biochemistry professor. “It provides a fairly stressful environment” along with the support of peer advisers who have been through it.

Students learn how not to get overwhelmed during a week when they have three exams and a paper due. They learn how to manage their time, how to power through sleep deprivation, and where to go for help, he said. “Evaluations at the end of summer bridge are typically quite negative,” Summers said. “They don’t like it. It’s too intrusive.” But even though many students “hate summer bridge,” he said it’s what they most frequently cite at graduation as the most important part of the program.

“It’s not uncommon that a student calls a parent saying, ‘Get me out!’ and a parent calls Meyerhoff,” he said. A staff member usually encourages the parent to contact a peer from the Meyerhoff Parents Association. “They might hear that ‘My kid went through it, but in the end felt it was the most important part of the program. Just trust that they’re there to take care of your kid.’” Baker, the longtime Meyerhoff director, said if students are feeling sleep deprived, they might not be managing their time well, and time management is one of the most important skills they learn during summer bridge. Maybe, she said, they’re staying up late talking to friends.

“Summer bridge is not a punishment,” she said. “It is introducing high-school students to how to change their study habits and be better prepared for college.”

Group grading, Baker conceded, was a difficult sell. “Students did not always like the fact that ‘I got 100 and someone else got 63. Why do I get the 63?’ When you explain it to them and they see how important it is for all students to succeed, you have a change of culture,” she added. “They want to know — ‘Who got the 63?’ Let’s work together and bring this up.”

Walking in a tight line with no gaps reinforces the sense of connection, Baker said, although she added that when a videotape showing such a procession went out, she got phone calls from people who said it was “unfair” to move students around that way. As for the grass and elevator rules, she said, students should stick to designated walking areas out of respect for the people who work hard to maintain UMBC’s grounds. Also, fitting 50 to 60 students into one elevator is unrealistic, but elevator use is allowed for students who have a special need, she said.

Students usually come through the experience feeling motivated and stronger, Baker said, pointing to those who volunteer to return as counselors. “If they didn’t see the value of their summer bridge experience,” Baker said, “they would never have come back.”

Be that as it may, other colleges that have built Meyerhoff spinoffs to recruit more students of color have either decided not to adopt or soon dropped some of the most controversial rules.

In 2013, Summers played a key role in replicating the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at Pennsylvania State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with financial support from the Howard Hughes Institute, where he is an investigator. Five years later, the network expanded again to the University of California’s Berkeley and San Diego campuses, with the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy established by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. At both UNC and Penn State, the programs have racked up impressive results, but not without complaints, he said. On both campuses “there were issues where students were unhappy and parents got involved,” Summers said. “Some Penn State parents felt it was a form of hazing and they had to make small adjustments.”

Hazing was and remains a sensitive issue at Penn State. In 2017, the campus experienced one of the nation’s most horrific hazing crimes after a fraternity pledge, Timothy Piazza, fell down a flight of stairs after a night of heavy drinking and later died of traumatic brain injuries. Since then, Penn State has scrutinized all of its programs and operations to eliminate anything that could be interpreted as hazing.

Amy Freeman is director of the university’s Millennium Scholars Program, modeled on Meyerhoff. The program, which she described as “a milder version of military boot camp,” has changed somewhat over the years in response to student feedback. The lack of sleep was one of the biggest complaints, Freeman said. A 2015 article, published by Penn State, referred to students getting four to five hours of sleep at night. Two years later, just months after Piazza’s death, the campus newspaper published an article about the “many mental breakdowns” among the program’s scholars because of the intense demands, including earlier and earlier wake-ups and 10-page essays when someone breaks the rules.

“We’ve learned that there’s room for sleep,” Freeman said. Students no longer have to walk in a single line. They can travel in small groups, but not alone. The day is slightly shorter than it used to be, and students get occasional breaks to use their phones. “We were criticized for not having enough physical activity, so we put in some flex times for things like yoga and dancing,” she said. The program has also dropped group consequences for any minor infraction, she said. Despite what you might read on Reddit, “it’s not all death, damnation, and sadness.”

Long, intense days and a heavy workload are hallmarks of summer bridge at the University of California at San Diego, but there’s no walking in lines, group grading, or collective punishment if someone’s late for class.

An instructor might point out that a student is missing and ask his classmates to call to make sure he was coming, but they no longer have to write essays about why being late is bad. “We definitely make sure they know they’re responsible for each other,” said Gentry N. Patrick, a professor of neurobiology and executive faculty director of the PATHS Scholars Program.

Ronald H. Smith is the inaugural director of the Karsh STEM Scholars Program at Howard University. Now in its eighth year, the program shares the goals and much of the structure of the UMBC program but without rules like walking in tight lines and group punishments.

Smith, a graduate of UMBC who was working in the university’s financial-aid office when Meyerhoff began, said some of the strategies that work on that campus might be counterproductive at Howard, a historically Black university that draws students from both elite private schools and under-resourced urban schools.

Even though the structure may not be as regimented, Howard’s program is hardly Meyerhoff light, he suggested. “Our kids are up at 7 in the morning and going strong until about 10 at night. They’re allowed on their cellphone for one hour each day,” Smith said. “They have three hours of mandatory study hall. We’re pretty no-nonsense and we tell them upfront.”

Is the stress of Meyerhoff’s summer bridge program worth it? Some alumni consider it an effective way to prepare students of color for the world they’re about to enter. The rising sophomore who asked to remain anonymous said that, earlier this year, she saw Reddit posts from prospective students who were worried about what they were reading online. “I wanted to reach out to support them and let them know that summer bridge was definitely a lot, but in the end, it helped,” she said.

And so far, she’s feeling positive about the Meyerhoff program. Her advisers have helped her stay on track academically, find a space in a research lab, and apply for internships, she said.

Ocasio, the 2017 graduate, says it’s what helped him get through some of the most difficult moments in college. He would often look back on the experience and think, “Well, I’ve been through hell so I can get through this,” he said.

At the same time, he said, “there are other ways to equip people with the skills that they need that do not involve military fear tactics.”

Adjogah didn’t realize the full effect the Meyerhoff program had on her until many years later, with the help of therapy. “It’s sort of like a gradual thing,” Adjogah said. “You want to put it behind you and focus on having a normal college experience the best you can.” She worries about what could happen to future Meyerhoff scholars if the program doesn’t change.

Though she was accepted into a Ph.D. program, Adjogah decided not to pursue it and found a full-time computer-science job instead. She said Meyerhoff left her too burnt out to continue education.