What is B2R Scholars?
Bridge2Rwanda Scholars is a comprehensive program to help Rwanda’s best students prepare and show they are qualified for university in the U.S. We work with outstanding students to help them show they are good enough to succeed at US schools and to try to win scholarships.
How does your program work in practice?
We offer classes, similar to an intensive 7th year of secondary school. The difference is our classes focus on preparing students to transition into university in the US. This means our students work mostly in reading and writing in English, to improve until they are good enough to work in these subjects in a US university.
This is a very high level and requires a great deal of work from our students, but the results in our first group have been great.
The secondary benefit of the reading and writing work is that our students’ test scores improve greatly for the TOEFL and SAT exams they need to do well on, in order to show they are qualified to attend school in the US.
What have your results been so far?
Our typical student comes to us with a good TOEFL score, but an SAT score that is too low to apply for admission to US schools, and too low to win a scholarship. After they work on their reading and writing for six months, in addition to the other training and activities we provide them, our students’ test results are now good enough that they can often apply to the best schools in the US, and hope to get in with scholarships!
What does a typical Bridge2Rwanda scholar look like?
Our Scholars are very hard-working, ambitious students who want to achieve the best that they can for themselves and their country. Their English is very good to outstanding, and their secondary grades and national exam are outstanding. But above all, these are students who will work as hard as they can to realize their dreams.
We are doing this program because we see an opportunity for ourselves to help Rwandan students achieve great things, and because we think students who attend university in the US have the potential to be great future leaders in Rwanda. The goal, in fact, is to help Rwanda’s best students get the education they deserve, so that they can contribute as much as possible to the future of their country — so that they can be the future leaders of their country.
Besides classes, what else does the program involve?
When we started this program, we had a challenge: to help Rwandan students succeed at university in the US. When we looked at this goal, we realized very quickly that we had to provide training in quite a few different areas, to make sure our students are ready for college, to help them find the right school and get accepted, and to make sure they can succeed as they make the transition.
We provide all of the support our students need in order to succeed in this process, from classes to a resource lab that includes library and computers, to help finding the right schools and support at each step of the application process. The applications are so complicated; the only way to get through them is to work with someone who has already applied!
And now, we are providing additional classes to our students who have already applied to schools, so that they will be ready to walk into a university classroom from the first day.
What is the timeline for your program?
Our first group started in May 2011, studied through November and wrote the different exams (TOEFL, SAT and SAT subject tests) from August to December. The students worked on their applications from August and submitted most of them in December, with a few more this month.
They will hear back from schools mostly in February and especially March, but we have a few results already: 2 students have been admitted and started school in the US, while 2 more students have already been admitted to other universities and are waiting to hear back from more!
What kind of scores do students need to apply to US schools?
To apply to the hardest schools (which also have the most money for scholarships), a student needs to get a 600 or higher on the TOEFL. For the SAT, they should do as well as they can, ideally above 1800 since this is a score that an American might have to get into the same schools.
For the reading section on the SAT, students should try to get a 600 to get into the best schools, so that is the score to try for. In our first group of Scholars, nine of our students had TOEFL scores above 600 and nine of them also had SAT scores of 1500 or
higher.
What have you learned from the first group of students?
This is a remarkable process. To take one example: one of our Scholars came to us with scores that he couldn’t send anywhere, and after six months of hard work, he now has improved so much that he can apply to any school in the US. And if he gets in, this will be with a scholarship. And this is a typical outcome for us, to have students make that kind of improvement.
We take students who have the potential to succeed but who need to work a great deal, which we help them to do. After six months, the student who came to us with scores that she couldn’t send anywhere now has scores that are quite strong for African students.
More importantly, they are the best scores this student could get. So our students have great intelligence, the ability to work hard and potential, and we help them show what they can do.
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