Steven Spriggs, Texas A&M '13

I first met Steven Spriggs a year ago when he was a senior at Eisenhower High School in Lawton, Oklahoma, applying for admission to Cornell University. As an alumna involved with the Cornell Alumni Admissions Ambassadors Network (CAAAN), I am privileged to meet and to recruit many promising young men and women for my alma mater.

Steven and I met at Starbucks, and my immediate impression was that he is a young Barack Obama: earnest, responsible, and highly intelligent. He was a National Merit Finalist, an Eagle Scout, and he was also selected to participate in the Leadership Education and Development Program in Business (LEAD) at the University of Virginia’s top-ranked Darden School of Business. A partnership of some of the top corporations and business schools in the country, LEAD’s mission is to build “a talented and diverse workforce ready for the global business environment.” Each summer, a highly diverse group of academically gifted and multi-talented high school juniors is selected for the program.

Despite his leadership roles and state and national awards, Steven is a humble young man from a former military family with a preternatural awareness of the world around him. He described to me how he helped organize a fundraiser to draw attention to the increasing number of people left homeless―students spent the night in the high school auditorium, confined to the living space of a cardboard box. This was a vivid portrayal of destitution, but one that I would have expected from a student attending an urban high school, not in America’s heartland where overt neediness is often invisible.

Given the questions he asked, the interview lasted an hour and a half.

When I next heard from Steven, it was to let me know he had been accepted to Cornell and the University of Chicago, but that Texas A&M had offered him a financial aid package that paid for all his college expenses. He would be able to graduate debt-free and to attend college closer to home. He asked if he could stay in touch with me, and I agreed to be his mentor. Continue reading Steven Spriggs, Role Model Millennial