Shortly after opening her Harvard acceptance letter, Jaila Mabry ’27 received an invitation to a summer program on campus. She wasn’t sure it was real.
The Rising Scholars Program (RSP) was offering a chance to come to Harvard early, take introductory courses, and spend the summer living and studying alongside peers from similar backgrounds. Mabry accepted, and she didn’t regret it.
“It was very foundational to my experience as a Harvard student entering such an intense environment,” Mabry said.
When she arrived in the summer of 2023, RSP was in its inaugural year, designed to provide students from under-resourced high schools with foundational math and writing skills in the summer before their first academic year.
Now in its fourth year, RSP has doubled its cohort size, welcoming 46 students to campus from June 20 to August 8. Dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh attributed the uptick, in part, to changes to the program’s messaging: clearly communicating the academic and financial benefits upfront and relying on word of mouth from past participants.
The program was created to supplement existing academic support for first-generation students at the College. While other initiatives focused on community building and making students feel welcome on campus, Claybaugh said RSP was created to bridge the skills gap that left many of these students feeling unprepared.
“People feel welcome at Harvard when they feel like they’re thriving in the classroom,” Claybaugh said. “If they don’t feel like that in the classroom, then everything around the classroom can be perfect, but they won’t feel fully ‘here.’”
RSP has since broadened its scope from first-generation students to include those from under-resourced high schools—a metric admissions offices determine based on a school’s college-level academic offerings to capture a need that first-generation status alone misses. For many students, meeting others from similar backgrounds is a key draw to enrolling.
“The other thing that really enticed me, beside all the classes being in Boston and getting to be here over the summer, was also definitely meeting others like me,” Connor Buchanan ’29 said.
Students arrive in Cambridge every June to live and study for seven weeks, with programming extending into the academic year. During the summer, the students take classes similar to Harvard’s existing introductory writing and math courses—Expos Studio 10 and Math MA.
Other schools often allow students to take a ninth semester to accommodate additional introductory courses, but Harvard is unable to due to the constraints of its residential model, which only accommodates students for eight semesters. This, Claybaugh said, sparked the idea of bringing students to campus before their first year begins.
“We actually do a pretty good job bridging from high school to college. The only thing is, it takes time,” she said.
The academic programming, condensed to a seven-week version of the courses, creates a high-demand, high-support environment, according to Gillian Pierce, the associate dean of undergraduate education, academic programs and policy. Students are also given the chance to connect with faculty on a smaller scale, which past participants said was helpful in teaching them how to build relationships with professors who might previously have seemed intimidating.
“It’s pretty intensive,” Pierce said. “Even the faculty teaching in the program who’ve taught other summer school courses note that it’s more contact hours. It’s intended to be a program that really challenges students in a setting where we can provide a lot of support.”
Letter grades are not awarded in RSP courses, although students receive a score on individual assignments. Instead, the program pushes students to reflect on their work to build more effective study habits—something that some participants felt they lacked before participating in the program.
“I had to really reflect and think about what worked best for me now that things were so instructed,” Vanessa Grant ’28 said. “I think this was very helpful going into first year because I had started to develop those habits and learn some of the spaces that would help to encourage a focused state of mind for me.”
While term-time coursework is often focused on achieving a high grade, Mabry said RSP fostered a lower-stakes environment where students could concentrate on the process of learning rather than the outcome.
“I was worried a lot less about grades, which made me a bit more invested in actually getting something out of the content, which I think is very, very valuable for entering Harvard,” Mabry said.
The program also strengthens non-academic aspects of participants’ lives, incorporating residential programming and social outings in Boston and Cambridge throughout the summer. Pierce said the cohort structure—where students live in shared housing and follow the same academic schedule—is integral to the program, and fosters peer-to-peer support.
“Our assessments of the program show that students really appreciate and value that part of it,” Pierce said, adding that students often feel like they have a “group that’s really central to [their] identity here at Harvard.”
Grant said the cohort’s shared schedule made it easy for those bonds to form naturally, without much effort.
“It created a space where many of us created the same habits for daily academic, and eventually social, life as we got to know one another,” she said. “It was nice to know that I could have a study buddy for a working lunch because we all had the same lunch because all of us were taking the same class.”
Beyond the program’s academic and social value, several participants said that it fosters a quieter kind of growth. Buchanan said that one of the most important lessons he learned through RSP was that success cannot be measured by comparing yourself to others—a realization he came to after recognizing that students from every background constantly compare themselves to one another, even as they assume everyone else is further ahead.
“What I give to Harvard, what I get from Harvard, is really tied to what I believe to be successful,” he said he came to understand. “If I start trying to mirror or copy other people, my goals and my level of success may change.”
