Young Owls are paying it forward

Denise Castillo is a rising sophomore at Houston’s Hightower High School, a young woman planning to become a veterinarian and, one day, take care of her parents the way they’ve taken care of her family.

“My dad grew up here and my mom grew up in Mexico,” Castillo said. “That made me who I am and I want to grow up to make both of them proud, because I see how much they sacrificed for me and my sister to have a better life. It makes me more determined to push forward and do better.”

Ruth López Turley, professor of sociology and director of the Houston Education Research Consortium, was one of many faculty and staff who spent time with students in the Young Owls Leadership Program. (Photos and video by Brandon Martin)

Castillo is one of dozens of local high school students — all of them from underserved communities — who’ve spent the last week at Rice University, living at Will Rice College, eating in the servery, bonding over group games in the quad and soaking up everything they can from Rice faculty, staff and students about the college experience.

This is the Young Owls Leadership Program (YOLP), now in its seventh year, a free camp founded and run by Rice undergraduates who were once in the same position as the high school students they’re now mentoring.

First-generation college students know from their own experience the unique challenges presented by the college application process. YOLP allows these first-gen Rice undergrads to impart a little of their own wisdom and life lessons while immersing high school students in a radically different learning environment.

As a future first-gen college student herself, Castillo found the week helped prepare her for the path ahead, from learning how to write an impactful college essay to discovering where to find financial assistance.

Students competed to build the strongest bridge at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

“I didn’t know you could get a scholarship or a grant because your family has a low income rate,” Castillo said. “Without this program, I wouldn’t be learning everything that I am and I wouldn’t have met all these amazing people.”

Having Rice students as mentors, she said, made all the difference.

“I think that the concept of the students running the program is actually really, really good,” she said. “They’ve been in that situation and now they’re trying to help other kids who have also gone through that situation. That’s a really brilliant idea — to help a person is paying it forward.”