By John Woodford

If you succeed in science it is largely based on what you can do for yourself," observes Billy J. Evans, professor of chemistry and head of the Program in Scholarly Research for Urban/Minority High School Students (PSR).

This year, 22 Detroit-area 8th through 12th graders participated in the 1994 PSR, bringing the total to 175 since Evans launched the Program in 1981. Each student picks a research project with a faculty adviser, completes the project, writes it up and presents it. The regimen is scrupulously professional, Evans says, because the goal "is not to get them to go to college or to give them exposure to a university--it's to get them to go to graduate school.

The students reside on campus for eight weeks in the summer, and many continue with their research projects on weekends or weeknights throughout the school year.

"Almost any student can stand a highly structured program for a few weeks" Evans says. "It takes a very motivated student to stick with 20 weeks of unprogrammed work. Here, they learn to use their eyes, their hands, to work in a lab with great resources, one open to them 24 hours a day--it's a setting where they can learn how to make up for any deficiencies they have. They learn to operate sophisticated laboratory equipment and to perform sophisticated calculations."

Both anecdotal and objective evidence support Evans's enthusiasm for the Program. Since 1982, every winner of a Westinghouse Science award at the city level in Detroit has gone through the program. This year, the only Westinghouse national winner from the state of Michigan was a PSR student, Darius Hollings.

"Darius is from the East Side of Detroit," Evans says, "and although his SAT scores were low, his grades were high, and he is very hard working. He is probably the first member from an under-represented minority group to become a Westinghouse finalist."

Although the PSR is not a direct recruiting program, about half of the participants have enrolled at U-M. Hollings, however, decided to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, where Evans got his bachelor's degree before receiving his doctorate at the University of Chicago.

The PSR students' continued success at the city and state levels in Westinghouse competitions is important, Evans says, "because it is an independent validation of our approach: there are no affirmative action or diversity rules involved in the Westinghouse program."

Evans also points out that the U-M program "keeps the state in the Westinghouse picture. Michigan is lower than Indiana, Illinois and Ohio in Westinghouse winners by a factor of two, but Michigan has more Black winners than any other state in the country, and more minority winners than New York, which has the most winners of any state but also by far the most applicants."

Evans had the PSR independently evaluated in 1991. Eighty-five percent of students who completed the PSR program attended college, 46 percent completed college and 37 percent attended graduate school.

Statistics like those "would be impressive if they were based upon students in an exclusive prep school" the survey noted. "When such percentages describe urban and minority public high school students from the Detroit area, they are extraordinary."

Those who have benefited most from the Program, Evans says, "are the ones who've had the greatest needs-the economically needy student from a nonprofessional family. They come from families with no computers, with no quiet room for study, yet they do the best absolutely, they perform the best."

Evans emphasized that the fact that the students can follow up their projects during the school year is a key part of the PSR, which is currently in the second year of a two year, $255,856 grant from the National Science Foundation Young Scholars Program.