Meg Urry, Israel Muson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is part of the advisory board for the Global Teaching Project (GTP) and has been involved since she helped develop a prototype physics class in 2015. She taught at the first summer bootcamp in 2017 and stays involved by providing remote lectures.
An educational organization founded by Yale alumni offers nearly all the AP STEM classes in Mississippi’s most impoverished communities — free of charge.
It’s mid-afternoon on a hot summer day in Mississippi, and Matt Dolan ’82 has assembled a small army of promising high school students at Mississippi State University in Starkville for some academic adventuring.
“They’re all upstairs right now,” Dolan says, chuckling slightly but bracing for the logistical journey ahead. “It is a very complicated process, getting everyone here, signed up, and started for camp. But they’re great kids. All they want to do is work hard and learn.”
Roughly 150 participants from across the Delta in northwestern Mississippi and beyond — students from rural, low-income school districts — will immerse themselves in a free, week-long bootcamp devoted to college-level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills. They’ll get instruction, tutoring, and mentoring from faculty, alumni, and students from some of the best universities in the country, and be steeped in the wisdom and rigor inherent in a thriving college environment.
Then these students will head back to their local high schools, where, starting in the fall, they’ll join hundreds of other classmates in the Global Teaching Project’s (GTP) Advanced STEM Access Program. The program, founded by Dolan nearly a decade ago, brings science-related Advanced Placement (AP) courses, free of charge, to high schools where AP classes are not available.
It’s a kind of collaborative teaching approach that has firmly taken root in the Delta and elsewhere in rural Mississippi and which has potential across the United States.
“If you’re a student with college aspirations, taking an AP class is one of the best things you can do for yourself,” said Oso Ifesinachukwu ’23, director of student outreach and engagement for GTP, a Texas native and former defensive end on the Yale football team. “Providing that experience is the closest thing we can do to exposing students to a college environment.”
In addition to the organization’s entire team of full-time employees, all of whom are Yale College graduates, dozens of Yalies have served as tutors during the past nine years (including nine in the most recent year), Dolan said.
Starting in the summer of 2017 with about 100 kids from nine schools, GTP has opened doors to secondary education in STEM disciplines for thousands of students — more than 3,500 from nearly 50 rural Mississippi high schools, at last count. It is changing lives and building community at a time when science education can be the key to collegiate success and long-term career opportunities.
And a lot of people are taking notice.
“The Advanced STEM Access Program has proven uniquely successful in addressing disparate access to AP STEM courses, an issue of critical national importance,” College Board, the organization that administers AP tests, noted in a letter to federal education officials last year.
Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation honored Dane Peagler, a GTP supervising instructor, with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, and former U.S. Rep. Mike Espy, a Democrat, praised the program in an op-ed in the Magnolia Tribune.
Of the 50 most impoverished rural school districts in the United States, the only ones to offer AP Physics — and most of the AP Biology, AP Computer Science, and AP Statistics classes — were districts that work with GTP, according to data from the U.S. Census and the College Board.
“We meet these kids where they are, in their schools and in their communities,” said Kiran Ghia ’01, GTP’s chief strategy officer. “They’re on the cusp of adulthood. Catching them at this age and showing them what a STEM career can do for them, changes personal trajectories.”
The success of the program is measured in different ways, Dolan said. One measure, of course, is how well the students perform on the AP exams. While most results from this spring’s exams are not yet available, GTP reported strong results from individual students and certain classes, Dolan said. For instance, GTP students were among just 21 students statewide (from public or private schools) to earn the highest possible AP Physics I score, and among just 28 students to earn the highest possible AP Computer Science Principles score.
Early reports on class results were equally encouraging. For instance, among GTP students from one AP computer science class, 85% (11 of 13) achieved qualifying scores (in other words, scores that earned them college credit). That was more than double the percentage for all Mississippi examinees and far higher than the percentage among all test takers, Dolan said.
At the same time, however, the program’s aim is not to maximize scores. That, Dolan said, could be achieved by being more selective in terms of which schools it serves and which students take the exams. Rather, GTP seeks to serve communities with the greatest need — and encourages all students to take the AP exams.
“We seek to have our students learn, and learn how to learn,” he said.
Almost all the students GTP serves go on to college, Dolan said. While the program does not take credit for that, there is evidence that the program has a positive impact on how well they fare once they get to college, the majors they select, and how they do after graduation, he said.
For example, Dolan noted the experience of students enrolled in the only high school serving Holmes County (which has the lowest median income of any of the state’s 82 counties) during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the school was closed for 17 months, the most reliable source of instruction for those students, Dolan said, was the GTP program. One of those students went on to attend Jackson State University, where the university placed her in a summer program assuming she did not have the experience of other aspiring STEM majors. After she quickly demonstrated her strong educational foundation, the university nominated her for a National Science Foundation scholarship, which she received.
“I am proud to note that she went on to thrive at JSU, and at prestigious internships,” Dolan said.
Another former GTP student from Holmes County, Demeria Moore, is about to start her senior year at Mississippi State University, majoring in biological sciences. She participated in two GTP summer programs and took AP Physics I and AP Computer Science Principles at McAdams High School in Sallis, Mississippi.
“My introduction to the college world would not have been nearly as smooth without my GTP experiences,” Moore said. “Those experiences put a lot of things into perspective for me and opened up my mind to the world around me.”
Moore thrived in the rigorous atmosphere of the GTP programs, she recalled, which allowed her to dive into new physics and computer science concepts immediately and bring in questions for her instructors about anything she didn’t fully understand. “It’s very similar to a college workload,” she said.
After graduating from McAdams High, Moore completed a two-year program at Holmes Community College. At Mississippi State she is a Presidential Scholar.
“The intensity with which Demeria worked — particularly during COVID, when her school was physically closed and largely non-functional for over a full year — was, and is, truly an inspiration,” Dolan said.
Meeting a need
During the school year, each GTP class uses a hybrid teaching system, with in-person instruction and tutoring, as well as college-level and AP-certified instructors who teach via Zoom sessions.
“It quickly evolved into an intensive, very supportive program that is incredibly effective,” said Meg Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a member of GTP’s advisory board.
Urry was part of the initial discussions about teaching AP physics for GTP. She taught at the summer bootcamp in 2017 and has also provided remote lectures. Her sister, Lisa Urry, a biology professor at Mills College at Northeastern University, also is a longtime GTP instructor.
“The kids in this program are incredibly smart and they pick up on new ideas quickly,” Meg Urry said. “This is clearly meeting a need. And it has quite a bit of Yale in its DNA.”
That starts with founder and CEO Dolan, a former tax attorney based in Washington, D.C. As a Yale College student, Dolan volunteered at Augusta Troop Middle School in New Haven as a tutor. He would continue that volunteer work elsewhere as he moved on to the University of Virginia School of Law and then into professional life.
Eventually, he decided to take a big swing at serving public education on a larger scale.
“My general notion was to increase the scope of educational opportunities for students being deprived of it, and it became evident very quickly to me that one of the most pressing problems was the teacher shortages in STEM areas at the secondary level,” Dolan said. “There are no advanced STEM classes in many low-income and rural areas. And that led me to Mississippi.”
Dolan began work on a prototype physics class in 2015, refining it with Urry and other educators in 2016. He organized the first GTP summer program in 2017.
“We had no stature or track record to go on,” Dolan said. “I physically went to all these school districts, met with superintendents, assured them that we weren’t charging anyone any money and we weren’t setting up a competing school. We just wanted to put smart, motivated students together with gifted educators.”
‘Beyond the exams’ - a human connection
GTP soon learned something else: the in-person component of the process, including the boot camp, is essential to the process.
“Being there in person, with the community we have built, that is our secret sauce,” said Ghia, the Yale College alum serving as GTP’s chief strategy officer. “It creates bonds and a trust that allow us to expect a certain academic rigor in the classroom.”
As a Yale undergraduate, Ghia, who has now been part of GTP since 2017, worked at Dwight Hall, the university’s student-led center for public service and social justice. She says New Haven “left a big mark on my heart,” prompting her to make education part of her life even as she ventured into a career as a lawyer.
She (along with other Yale alums) had just helped launch Avasara Academy, a secondary school and leadership academy for adolescent girls in India, when she met Dolan and learned about his work in Mississippi. GTP’s mission resonated with her as a way to honor the hard work of her parents, who came to the U.S. as immigrants from India and went on to make educational opportunity a cornerstone of their family’s American experience.
Ghia said the GTP experience, while being academically ambitious, is also fundamentally human. She recalled a summer boot camp, for example, when a tutor — Erin Lippitt ’22, then a Yale undergrad studying astrophysics — noticed a student having trouble understanding material being projected on a screen.
For the duration of the program, Lippitt was at that student’s side, taking notes about anything being projected and answering questions. “There’s a human connection that goes beyond the exams,” Ghia said. “We see these kids and meet them where they are.”
Indeed, GTP has expanded the role of on-site tutors in recent years, viewing them as role models who make a statement about the value of STEM skills simply by the way they present themselves in the world.
Earlier this year, Ifesinachukwu and other GTP personnel stepped in when an on-site AP Biology instructor at South Pontotoc High School in northeastern Mississippi, died. Ifesinachukwu taught classes in person and remotely, calling it “an experience I won’t ever forget.”
Nor will the school. “In Pontotoc County, we are grateful to our community, and to GTP,” wrote Brock Puckett, superintendent of the Pontotoc County School District, in an op-ed to the Daily Journal newspaper.
“I’ve seen how education has taken me to places I wouldn’t have expected,” said Ifesinachukwu, who hails from Austin, Texas. “And it came down to doing little things right in the classroom.”
The challenge of disparate access to advanced STEM courses for promising high school students and chronic teacher shortages is hardly limited to Mississippi, GTP leaders say. It’s evident in varying degrees throughout the United States. That is why GTP has been working with educators elsewhere — including southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia — to expand access to AP STEM courses in those areas.
“We hope to implement our initial courses there soon,” Dolan said. “The work we do in Mississippi is, and is meant to be, scalable, and we have been working to do just that.”
This story was adapted from the Yale News story of August 6, 2025, by Jim Shelton