Bourne Students Receive Scholarships After Academic Program At MMA
Two Bourne students were awarded scholarships by Massachusetts Maritime Academy during the recent commencement ceremony for the Advanced Studies & Leadership Program (ASLP), a nearly two-decade old program held at the school in partnership with the Cape Cod Collaborative.
Mikayla and Zoe Noonan, 15-year-old twins from Bourne, just started their freshman year at Bourne High School but spent their last slice of summer living and learning at MMA as part of the program. ASLP is open to high-achieving students entering 8th and 9th grades in qualifying school districts and is intended to inspire them to realize the possibilities that await them in higher education.
The program emphasizes leadership through project-oriented instruction in STEM and humanities. Students rotate through a series of STEM courses every few days and were able to select their own humanities concentration for the 10-day residential program. At the end of the program, three one-year academic scholarships to MMA were awarded to Mikayla, Zoe and Carl Clarke of Nantucket.
It was Zoe’s second year doing ASLP, she explained, while Mikayla was experiencing it all for the first time.
“I knew Zoe had gone last year, and I was at the time super-jealous that she got to go and I didn’t, so I jumped at the chance to go,” she said. “It seemed like something new that I had never done before, and I wanted to try.”
Trying new things is something both girls were excited about, but in different ways. One of the three STEM courses Mikayla took was navigation, something she had never done before but quickly realized she enjoyed. Charting courses, using tools and solving navigational problems was something she liked, despite its challenges.
“I thought it was really cool, the idea of being able to chart your own course,” she said. “All the tools were very confusing, but if I had more time or [were] able to study it more, it’s something that would interest me.”
Although she is intrigued by the promise of exploration that comes along with pursuing a career in navigation, Mikayla is not quite sure if that would be her career of choice. Zoe, on the other hand, found a true passion through one of her three STEM courses: emergency management, which she said was her favorite. During the course, the students did various simulations including a group simulation of a zombie apocalypse and a simulation of a boat crash and diesel leak in the Cape Cod Canal.
“I would love to do emergency management,” Zoe said.
“Once she started emergency management,” Mikayla said of her sister, “she would tell me how much she loved it. It was so fun. I was so excited for her.”
The girls took their courses separately, with Zoe also taking classes on the chemistry of water and strength and materials while Mikayla opted for “discover science of Cape Cod” and power engineering.
For humanities, Zoe took improv—her second year doing it—and Mikayla chose art. While she has always had a passion for art, Mikayla said the course instructor at ASLP helped give her a new perspective on it.
“My art teacher wanted to challenge us to think about art differently,” she said. “We’d have to pick one object to draw every night, which was like our homework. Just five or 10 minutes, pick the same object to draw. I picked a deck of cards, and we had to do it in a different medium each night, so it was really interesting. I thought about it in such a different way than I had before, so that was really fun.”
For Zoe, improv helped get her and her group members get out of their comfort zones, something Mikayla said she noticed by the end of the program when all of the students came together for a showcase.
“The improv was probably my favorite to watch because they did little skits,” she said. “It was really fun to see the transition in kids because the first night we got there we had an assembly and everybody was super-shy and intimidated. Nobody wanted to talk to each other. And then at the end we have these improv skits where everybody’s super-goofy and silly. It was like everybody coming together, and it was really fun to see how far everyone had come.”
By the end of a jam-packed 10 days, students had adjusted to “dorm living,” gotten to spend time learning about the school from MMA cadets, completed three STEM courses with various projects to show for it, enjoyed guest lecturers, taken field trips and done a number of fun group activities including using remotely operated vehicles and racing to see who could suit up in cold-water immersion suits the fastest.
“We were exhausted by the end of it,” Mikayla said, “but I’m super-grateful that we got to go because it was such a great experience.”