The Chance They Deserve
The innovative Torch Scholars programs helps extraordinary students open the door to an education they once thought beyond their reach -- and keeps the university true to its roots.

It’s a rainy and unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in early January as students trickle back to the North­eastern campus after the holiday break. Dressed in baggy shorts and a Swedish metal band T-shirt, freshman Jordan Munson strolls into a lounge in the Curry Student Center, where the Patriots game is showing on a large-screen TV, and breaks into a wide grin.

“I love Northeastern!” he exclaims, settling into a chair at the Starbucks café along one end of the room. “It’s beyond comprehension, the feeling for me of being here. Just waking up makes me happy.” He shakes his head, still smiling, and adds, “The first thing I said when I got here today was ‘Wow, it feels great to be home.’”

Just six months ago, Munson’s home was a tiny Maine hamlet called Lubec, the easternmost town in the United States, so far north it touches Canada, so small and removed that his high-school class was made up of just nine students. Lubec’s once-thriving fishing port is now mostly defunct; only one fish-processing plant remains. Substance abuse and domestic problems are commonplace.

Munson’s mother gave birth to him and his twin brother when she was twenty. A few years later, she deposited the boys with her parents, who became their legal guardians and raised them.

Rural Maine is poor, and Munson’s grandparents have always hovered at the poverty line. When the work is available, his grandfather earns ten bucks an hour handling maintenance chores at a housing development for seniors and the disabled. His grandmother picks blueberries and collects periwinkles on the seashore for sale to grocers.

Munson hated the claustrophobic feeling of small-town life and his peers’ lack of interest in the outside world. He spent his time penning lyrics for rock songs and dreaming of getting out. Though he loves sports—today he keeps craning his neck to check the Pats score—he was too short and thin to be a great athlete. Intense and intellectually curious, he wasn’t part of the in crowd or invited to a lot of high-school parties.

He was set on one goal: getting out and going to college. But no one in his family, nor many in his hometown, had ever been to college. There were few college-prep courses at his high school, so Munson studied math and English during the summers at the Upward Bound program at Bowdoin College.

During a trip to Boston in his sophomore year, he visited Northeastern. Love at first sight. He was set on going to NU. The question was, how? He had the drive and the creativity to thrive. What he didn’t have was the money or the test scores and the grades to get in.

“Munson!”

Ana Hidalgo spots Munson from across the lounge and runs over to encase him in a bear hug. They exchange news, and smile and share jokes like siblings. “He’s my brother,” Hidalgo confirms, with a firm nod of her head.

Over the holidays, Hidalgo got to spend some time with her mother, who has moved back to the Dominican Republic after raising Ana in a Lawrence, Massachusetts, housing project. Ana still has her Lawrence ties, too. She’s been waitressing at the Friendly’s fast-food restaurant there for years. Even during her first semester at Northeastern, she continued to work at Friendly’s two weekends a month—though she has just been persuaded to look for a part-time job a little closer to campus.

The truth is, waitressing two weekends a month is like a vacation for Hidalgo, who worked twenty-five to thirty hours a week in high school supporting herself and her disabled mother.

Her days were long: up early for classes at the Catholic high school she attended on scholarship, volunteer work in the afternoons (she founded a diversity club at her school and worked at a drug-abuse prevention center), a few hours at the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence tutoring other children, then off to her job at Friendly’s, which ended around midnight. From one to three a.m., she did her homework.

Like Munson, Hidalgo was an ideal Northeastern student: smart, ambitious, self-motivated. But because she worked so much during high school just to survive, her grades suffered, and her chances for admission were iffy.

Today, Hidalgo and Munson are full-time students at Northeastern, their college costs fully covered by an innovative new initiative called the Torch Scholars program. It provides a five-year all-inclusive scholarship to students who might not qualify for admission to Northeastern under traditional measures but who show an exceptional aptitude for success.

These are students who haven’t been dealt the best hands in life, yet they work very hard, have natural leadership abilities, and display special reserves of perseverance. In short: Precisely the kind of student who has historically made North­­eastern great.

A desire to honor the university’s roots inspired the creation of the Torch Scholars program, which began this academic year. There was growing sentiment that Northeastern was losing touch with one of its oldest missions: providing educational access to students from less-advantaged backgrounds who have the drive and the potential to do very well in school and beyond.

The numbers help explain why. Tuition costs have soared. The competition for Northeastern seats is fierce, with over 30,000 applicants this year, an all-time high, for the 2,800 freshman seats.

Though delighted at the university’s growing national stature, Philomena Mantella, senior vice president for enrollment management and student affairs, wanted to create a program where kids with a strong work ethic and practical intelligence got a chance to walk through the doors, too.

Alumni “are obviously pleased at the direction Northeastern is going in terms of excellence,” says Mantella. “But they are also concerned about the cost and the selectivity. They would say, ‘Northeastern made me who I am—but students like me can’t go here anymore.’”

And so, out of Mantella’s vision, the idea of the Torch Scholars was born, to identify and enroll students with drive, perseverance, and leadership abilities who might not have qualified for admission under ordinary guidelines but who have overcome significant obstacles and show excellent potential.

The scholarships cover 100 percent of the cost of attending Northeastern while earning an undergraduate degree, including tuition, room and board, and fees. The scholars will complete specially designed co-op positions in which they will work with corporate and civic leaders in their chosen fields. Each will also hold down a work-study job on campus.

In addition, the scholars receive ongoing support from program administrators, mentors, and, of course, each other, greatly increasing their chances for success.

As future Torch classes are admitted, the older scholars will guide the newcomers, and even remain involved in the program after graduation.

Mantella says that, although there are hundreds of college-access and scholarship programs in the United States, “this program is unique in so many capacities. In the innovative ways we identify potential. In the six-week summer immersion program. In our three-pronged support—personal, academic, and financial—and the leadership development. In the culture of support, pride, and shared success it creates among the students. And in the program’s links to Northeastern’s roots and alumni.”

“We believe,” says Meghan Allen Elia­son, the Torch Scholars director, “the students’ success will create a ripple effect, to strengthen the underserved communities from which they came.”

Two major donations initially funded the program. One came from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.

The other came from the family of Anthony Manganaro, E’67. Anthony, his wife, Michele, and their three grown children—Renee Manganaro Enright, AS’91; Todd Manganaro, BA’95; and Nicole D’Amore, L’97—are underwriting the education of ten of the inaugural scholars.

In addition to their gift, the Manga­naros advised on the formulation of the program’s selection criteria and were involved with the selection of the first class of scholars.

In each Torch Scholar’s bio lies a remarkable story of achievement in the face of adversity. For instance, there’s Danny Vazquez, the youngest of eight children, raised by his single dad in Lawrence after his mother died when he was nine. His older sister cared for him in the evenings until his father got off work at eleven thirty and took him home.

Vazquez credits the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence for emphasizing the importance of education. But in his senior year at Lawrence High School, he had no idea how he would pay for college.

“At times now, I’ll be in my dorm room, and it’s surreal I’m even there, at NU and in college,” he says. When he found out he’d been named a Torch Scholar, “I couldn’t believe it. My dad was speechless. I even called Meghan [Allen Eliason] to make sure it was for sure.”

All the Torch Scholars got to know each other last summer during the program’s six-week immersion period, designed to offer them a head start on college life. They roomed together, took classes, and participated in leadership workshops and other activities.

As a result, the students say, they grew very close, helping each other with homework and sharing personal stories. They currently live in the same residence hall, and they’ve expressed an interest in continuing to do so as sophomores. They’ve visited each other’s parents’ homes. They’re tight as a single unit—the Torchies. They’re tight in ever-shifting groups of twos or threes.

Once when Joseph Bordieri was struggling to rewrite an English paper, Hidalgo and Alvarez stayed up until six in the morning to help him. Hidalgo notes, “He ended up getting an A or A-minus on that paper.” Hidalgo and Munson bang their fists together. “Torch love,” Munson says, coolly. “Unstoppable. Unstoppable.”

For these eleven new friends, the scholarship program, with its built-in network of support, has quite literally changed their lives.

“It gives you a break,” Hidalgo says, smiling broadly. “I don’t have to work forty hours a week, trying to be an adult at sixteen, seventeen, holding down a job. I can focus on my studies.”

“It means more than everything in my life cumulatively,” Munson says. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”

To find the first group of scholars, Northeastern contacted high-school guidance counselors and others who work with young people, and asked them to suggest highly qualified students.

More than four hundred students were candidates for the scholarship, after being nominated by someone in their community or by a member of the Northeastern admissions staff. From that group, a selection committee chose forty-two finalists.

Then began a rigorous ten-step selection process, including personal interviews, a group exercise to assess leadership skills, and interviews with people who knew the applicants’ background stories. The process was designed to identify such qualities as tenacity, maturity, and the ability to meet long-term goals. Program administrators also took the unusual step of having applicants take a noncognitive test, which the Manganaros helped design, that seeks to measure emotional maturity and other positive attributes.

The eleven scholars selected for the inaugural class are all first-generation college students, many of whom worked through high school to help support their families. Seven grew up speaking a language other than English at home.

Eight are students of color (or 73 percent of the Torch Scholars group, versus 21.9 percent of the freshman class overall). Eight students are from Massachusetts: four from Boston, one from Somerville, two from Lawrence, and one from Foxborough. One is from rural Maine, one from Brooklyn, and one from San Diego.

Next year, another group of at least eleven scholars will begin their university studies; in every succeeding year a group of approximately the same size—or larger—will be enrolled.

The university hopes to build endowment support that permanently sustains the program. And donors, administrators say, are enthusiastically rising to the challenge.

Already the university has received additional commitments toward the class of scholars that will enter in 2007. Officials have also allocated support to the program from Northeastern’s Annual Fund, which is used only in behalf of the university’s highest priorities. Both the Board of Trustees and President Aoun have expressed their enthusiasm for the program’s approach.

“This program is bold and innovative in its ability to identify and nurture students with leadership potential,” says Aoun. “It is both a bridge to the past for North­eastern and also a path to our future. It shows that the institution can evolve and change while staying true to its core values.”

Obviously, as the program welcomes more and more students, significant financial support will be needed. Donors can support individual students with a commitment of $125,000. Permanent, endowed Torch Scholarships can be established with a gift of $500,000.

Because of the program’s emphasis on providing the students with guidance and advice, donors are encouraged to get to know the scholars and act as mentors to them.

“This is a fundraising priority that resonates deeply with alumni and friends,” says George Triantaris, North­eastern’s interim senior vice president for institutional advancement.

“The reason,” he says, “is that it’s really a reflection of the stories of many of our alums, who were first-generation college students from blue-collar backgrounds with a hunger to succeed. Now that they’re successful, they’re pleased to be able to give a new generation a chance, too.”

All the components of the program will be carefully analyzed and evaluated over time, Mantella says, so it can be shared with other universities and replicated, to become a national model.

“The Torch program is going to encourage others in our field to think differently about predictors of college success, about rewarding different types of intelligence, and about the best ways of supporting underrepresented college students,” she says.

At the Curry Student Center, Munson and Hidalgo continue to tell stories about their fellow scholars. “Nadia [Alvarez], you can’t play basketball with that girl. She thinks she’s playing rugby,” exclaims Hidalgo.

“Me, Nadia, Melanie, and QinRui were playing basketball in the Marino Center,” agrees Munson, laughing. “And Nadia—I don’t know if she’d ever seen a game of basketball. She was just tackling people. It was, like, ‘Flagrant foul!’”

Then there was the time the group was returning from a trip to Washington, D.C., where they got a chance to meet and thank the Manganaro family. Going through airport security, Bordieri couldn’t decide whether to put down the sandwich he held in one hand or the cell phone in his other. He chose to hang onto the sandwich—and lost the cell phone.

Hidalgo and Munson burst out laughing. “Bodi! Gee! Sometimes I’m like, ‘How do you manage it!’ It’s so Bodi,” says Munson.

The tight-knit friendships are something they believe will last forever. “I feel I could ask them anything,” says Munson of his fellow Scholars. “If I ever needed a place to stay, anything, I could just ask them.”

He smiles contentedly, and adds, “This ended up perfect. I can’t think of anything more perfect in my life. When I graduate, it’ll be time to make perfection again: find the right job, find the right person to settle down with.” Hidalgo nods. “But right now,” she says, “this is perfection, we can all agree.”

Elaine McArdle is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She profiled 2005 Alumni Award winner Herby Duverné, CJ’98, MJ’02, in the Fall 2005 issue.

Nadia Alvarez
San Diego, California
Cathedral Catholic High School
Intended Major: Health science

Alvarez, who hopes to have a health-care career working with children, suffered an early tragedy as a youngster when her father killed her mother and grandmother, then took his own life. She lived for a time in a children’s center, until her aunt and uncle moved from Mexico to care for her and her siblings. Alvarez was awarded a scholarship to a private San Diego high school, where she did well academically while holding down a job at Target and volunteering at a children’s hospital. Though she’s often homesick for California, Alvarez has become good friends with her Torch colleagues—especially Ana Hidalgo—frequently offering them academic help. Like all the Torch Scholars, she has a work-study job at Northeastern. Last semester, she also worked at the Friendly’s restaurant in Lawrence two weekends a month, along with Hidalgo.

Melanie Araujo
Somerville, Massachusetts
North Cambridge Catholic High School
Intended Major: Biochemistry

Graduating with a 3.8 GPA, Araujo was the valedictorian of her class at North Cambridge Catholic High School, a small school that provides educational opportunity to Boston-area students from multicultural backgrounds but offers few academic challenges and no AP courses. A varsity athlete and the editor of her high-school news­paper, Araujo was also the lead in various dramatic productions. During high school, she interned at Akamai Technologies in Cambridge and worked twenty hours a week at Alpha Omega, a retail jewelry store. Born to parents who emigrated from Cape Verde, Araujo served as a translator for her mother and disabled father. She hopes one day to do research in neuroscience.

Besa Beja
Dorchester, Massachusetts
John D. O’Bryant High School
Intended Major: Business

Beja moved to the United States from Albania with her family five years ago, after their safety was threatened due to political instability there. They knew very little English and faced a difficult transition to their new home. Beja won admission to John D. O’Bryant High School after doing well on its entrance exam, and earned a 3.4 GPA. Throughout high school, she worked to help support her family and served as their translator. She also participated in a variety of college-prep programs, including Gear Up, COACH, and Summer Search, which identifies promising high-school students with limited economic means and provides them with travel and leadership opportunities, such as the Outward Bound School, which Beja attended one summer. Getting the phone call telling her she was a Torch Scholar was, she says, “the most wonderful moment in my life.

Joseph Bordieri
Foxborough, Massachusetts
Foxborough High School
Intended Major: Human Dervices

Captain of his high-school varsity wrestling team as well as the varsity football team, Bordieri received a scholar-athlete award and was voted a two-sport league All-Star. A devout Catholic, Bordieri—“Bodi” to his Torch friends—volunteered with Best Buddies, working with mentally disabled children, and was president of his school’s chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving. Family issues helped to hinder Bordieri’s preparation for college. His mother has been ill for many years, and his parents have very limited financial means. To help out, Bordieri started his own landscaping business and also worked for his uncle’s janitorial business. This spring, he’s hoping to become a walk-on for the North­eastern football team. He has a work-study job in the university’s develop­ment office, which is appro­priate, since his career plan is to fundraise for a nonprofit. He and Torch Scholars program director Meghan Allen Eliason joke that he’ll be taking over her job someday.

Ana Hidalgo
Lawrence, Massachusetts
Central Catholic High School
Intended Major: Health Science

Raised by a single mother, Hidalgo grew up in a Lawrence housing proj­ect. Within her first few days as a freshman at a vocational high school, a teacher spotted her potential and helped her transfer to a private Catholic high school on scholarship. She tutored younger children as a regular volunteer at the Lawrence Boys & Girls Club, where she was named a 2006 Youth of the Year. During high school, Hidalgo—since the age of twelve, the sole means of support for her disabled mother—worked every night as a waitress at Friendly’s. She’d do her homework after midnight; electrical failures at her apartment frequently forced her to study by the parking-lot lights shining through her bedroom window. Founder of a diversity club at her high school, she also worked at a drug-abuse prevention office and hopes to become a pediatrician. Of the Torch Scholarship she says, “You have no idea how much this means to me.” Like Alvarez, she’s aiming for a health-care career that allows her to help children.

Ulysses Ifill
Brooklyn, New York
A. Philip Randolph High School
Intended Major: International Affairs

Ifill, whose family is from Barbados, speaks four languages and plans to major in international affairs, with the goal of becoming a United Nations translator. He and his two brothers, one of them his twin, were raised by a single mother who stressed the importance of education. Believing his local high school did not offer enough opportunity, Ifill enrolled in a better school eighty minutes from his home. The switch was a challenge, and he struggled to keep up, but emerged a solid student with an impressive resumé. Despite his long commute to school, he was very active with Legal Outreach, a college-preparatory program that focuses on writing and debating skills, and fosters paid internships at law firms. He loves Caribbean music and dance.

Jordan Munson
Lubec, Maine
Lubec High School
Intended Major: Music Industry

With just nine students in his high school class in Lubec—the easternmost town in the United States— Munson, an avid music fan who writes lyrics and poetry, knew he needed additional educational opportunities to prepare him for success in college. He enrolled in the Upward Bound program at Bowdoin College, designed for promising students in rural Maine, taking enrichment classes there during the summers. Raised along with his twin brother by his grandparents—his grandfather works as a maintenance man; his grandmother picks blueberries for extra money—Munson feared he wouldn’t be able to afford college. Moreover, no one in his family, and few in his town, had attended college, and so could provide little guidance on higher education. He plans a career in the music business.

Qinrui Pang
Charlestown, Massachusetts
Charlestown High School
Intended Major: Civil engineering

Born and raised in a small town in northeastern China, Pang moved to Charlestown about five years ago without a word of English in her vocabulary. Along with working at her family’s restaurant and caring for younger siblings, she became a top student at her high school, earning a 4.0 GPA. She was her class’s JROTC leader, served as a squadron commander for eighty-five cadets, and held down a summer job at a Harvard School of Public Health lab. Still working on improving her English skills, Pang teaches Chinese to a group of international students at North­eastern. After finishing her undergraduate studies, she plans to get a master’s in engineering, then work as a civil engineer for the city of Boston.

Odalis David Polanco
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
English High School
Intended Major: International Business

Just four years ago, Polanco arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic, knowing almost no English. He lived with his mother and sister in a single room in Boston, becoming a top student with a 3.6 GPA while taking several AP courses. He was a star athlete in track, basketball, and baseball; last year his baseball squad won the Boston city championship, with Polanco on second base. He earned the highest GPA of any varsity athlete in the city and received his school’s scholar-athlete award. In high school, Polanco participated in Northeastern’s Bridge to Calculus program and in Harvard Medical School’s AP biology program. He also traveled to Hon­duras twice to build homes for hurricane relief. Today, he is on the board of a new nonprofit that sends student volunteers to build homes in developing countries; he plans to take such a trip himself this summer. “When we left the Dominican Republic to start a new life here,” Polanco says, “we basically had to start from scratch.” Of Northeastern he says, “There are no words to describe it. I love it. It’s me.”

Michael Toney
Dorchester, Massachusetts
Melrose High School
Intended Major: Business

Each morning of his high-school career, Toney awoke at five to commute from his home in Dorchester to Melrose High School as part of the METCO program, through which inner-city youth attend better-funded suburban schools. Despite difficult family circumstances, he was a solid performer at a high school whose rigor far exceeded his previous academic preparation and a three-sport athlete. During the summers, he worked with youngsters as a camp counselor and a Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center mentor. Toney often had to step in to help raise his three younger siblings. A gifted artist, he is considering a career in graphic design or business.

Danny Vasquez
Lawrence, Massachusetts
Lawrence High School
Intended major: Criminal justice

The youngest of eight kids, Vazquez was raised by a single father after his mother died when he was nine. His older siblings helped him stay on track academically, and Vazquez earned a scholarship to a private school before transferring to less-rigorous Lawrence High School as a junior. A member of the National Honor Society, Vazquez took three AP courses his senior year, including AP physics. He is a dedicated volunteer and worked to enlist other high-school students to mentor kids at the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence, which he credits for influencing him to attend college. Being a Torch Scholar, he says, “is very, very surreal. I still can’t believe how lucky I am.”

 Photography by Tanit Sakanini