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Gulliver Prep senior Tomas Kay is the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in Music and Dance. Kay plays percussion in the wind ensemble and pep band at school. He’s president of the wind ensemble and is drum major of the pep band. Every year, Kay participates in solo and ensemble and district level band competitions.
Kay’s Silver Knight project is Students Without Limits (SWL), which he created two years ago. He attended an eight-week University of Pennsylvania summer course on Social Entrepreneurship via Zoom where he had mentors guide him to the market he wanted to work with.
“We received guidance for eight weeks,” he says. “We did presentations about what we learned about the market.”
From there he developed his project.
“The goal of the project is to promote the idea of passion mentoring,” he says. “It’s aspirational mentoring between students in the U.S. and students in Argentina. We are working with a couple of organizations. One is called Las Tunas. It’s a nonprofit educational organization that aims to give Argentine students scholarships. We contact them to arrange peer mentoring.”
From their side, they send out a form to everyone, and from there Las Tunas gives Kay the contact names. From there, they are contacted individually.
The second organization is Junior Achievement. They work with the Junior Achievement alumni program and the Speak Up program.
There is a curriculum for six structured mentoring sessions that Las Tunas helped them create to maximize SWL’s professionalism.
“Except for the first meeting,” he says. “It’s an introductory session. They are opening up to you, as to what they aspire to. They try to be as open to that and try to help them grow as a person.”
In the first session, the mentors give the mentees two minutes to write down what they are interested in.
“We don’t want them to write a list of 500 things,” he says. “We want to focus on the things that off the bat they are interested in. We go into narrowing down the interests.”
So, if they are interested in engineering, they try to get into specifics as to the type of engineering they like. The mentors also give the students additional resources to check out and build a calendar to help the students make time for their interests.
Currently there are 20 mentors. They worked with 15 students from Las Tunas and 180 students in the Speak Up program through Junior Achievement.
Most of the mentors are from Gulliver and they help the mentees with figuring out college majors and how to define what they want to do for a career.
“They (the mentees) are not as informed on the specifics of the subjects,” he says. “They are of interest to Argentine students. Having that academic passion allows them to be super motivated and it allows them to do well in school.”
Kay says they both learn from each other.
“I’m a mentor to a student in Argentina, who is interested in being an engineer,” he says.
“We focus on matching up the right student with the right students.”
“If they want to continue they can,” he says. “They can also come to us for advice. I did create the curriculum with Las Tunas. They helped to make it as professional as possible.”
Kay will be attending The University of Chicago. This summer he’ll be working at the University of Chicago Research Center.
At Gulliver he’s the president for competition for Mu Alpha Theta and he’s vice president of the Science National Honor Society.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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