“I would say our kids add a very southern flavor to Exeter and all the other schools where we send students during the summer,” says Carol Barnett, project coordinator of the Memphis PREP program for the past seven years. “They’re obviously very southern in their heritage, which gives them a different point of view. I also think they add a certain spirituality. Most of them are very active members of whatever religious community they belong to in Memphis.”

Started in 1969 as a response to the assassination, in Memphis, of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the program that is now known as Memphis PREP sends promising 10th and 11th graders from Memphis city schools to a number of summer academic enrichment programs throughout New England. This past summer, 16 students attended Exeter. A similar program, based loosely on Memphis PREP, was started in Jackson, MS, in 1998, and sent 18 students to Exeter this past summer. And three years ago, the Academy became associated with the Arkansas Commitment, a preexisting program for top students from the Little Rock area; six students have come each year since. All of these programs provide financial assistance and placement counseling and are intended to assist students in gaining admission to top-tier colleges.

Jacqueline Hicks Grazette attended the Exeter summer session in 1976 through Memphis PREP, and says the program helped launch her on to Harvard, where she earned both a B.A. and M.B.A. “As a young child, kids picked on me for being smart and doing my work,” says Hicks Grazette. “Exeter was the first time I was in an environment where I didn’t have to be ashamed of being smart. All the students were eager to learn and the faculty took us very seriously.” While the program wasn’t nearly as diverse as it is today—Hicks Grazette was one of just six African-American students on campus that summer and the only student from Memphis—it was her first exposure to people from so many different cultures as well as the colleges of the Northeast.

It was during her summer session at Exeter that Hicks Grazette first visited Harvard. “I’m not sure that I could have made the transition to Harvard if I hadn’t gone to Exeter first,” says Hicks Grazette, now a teacher at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., where she helped start St. Albans’ successful School of Public Service. “I was prepared for the harder level of work and being around kids from so many different backgrounds.”

Amber Baxley, a senior on campus this past summer through Memphis PREP, echoes these sentiments. In addition to being a challenging academic experience, Baxley says the summer program “was a great opportunity to gain more independence and prepare for college next fall.” Baxley adds that she liked being around “students who are at school because they want to be, not because they have to be.” Among the highlights for her was participating in the step team, something she had never tried before. “It was a great way to develop leadership skills as well as teamwork and friendship,” says Baxley, who hopes to start a team of her own at her high school in Memphis.

A mover and shaker back home in Jacksonville, AR, where she has served as class president at her high school for two years running and Miss Teen Jacksonville for 2003, Rhonda Allen had never traveled outside of the South prior to coming to Exeter. Living in Dow House (aka “The Dow Sisterhood”), Allen says she enjoyed being surrounded by students from the world over. “Even when we didn’t have scheduled dorm meetings, we all just sat around and talked about what it’s like to be a teenager from the Navajo Nation and how different that is from life in Jacksonville, and how that’s different from life in San Diego,” she says. “You get all ends of the spectrum, and all through the eyes of a teenage girl.” Students also learned a thing or two from Allen about what it’s like being a woman of color from Arkansas. “People have a lot of misconceptions about Arkansas and make jokes about the South, but I take it all with a grain of salt,” says Allen. “I’m real big on breaking the mold.”

David Dennis, a senior from Jackson, MS, can relate. “I was alarmed at how many people think that we all live in the backwoods and have no electricity,” says Dennis. While setting the record straight about the South, Dennis says that he has come to some new understandings of his own. “Mississippi can be a pretty isolated and close-minded place,” he says. “In my school, there are basically two groups: white and black. Exeter has allowed me to break stereotypes I’ve had about other groups. For instance, people tend to group all Spanish-speaking people together. This summer, I have been able to meet people from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Nicaragua and to differentiate between their cultures.”

According to his creative writing instructor Lundy Smith, Dennis’s ability to articulate his perspective as an African-American male from the South and his eagerness to learn about other cultures was always evident in the classroom. “David was very generous and always tried to mine something out of the other kids’ writing,” says Smith. “This builds trust in the classroom. People are flattered and try to reciprocate. From the very first day, he tried to get to know everyone.”

With its compressed time-frame and busy schedule of classes, athletics, extracurricular activities and field trips, the summer session is not without its challenges. Five weeks is a short amount of time for students to get acclimated to Exeter, each other and Harkness teaching. “In the regular session, you don’t even worry about the classroom dynamics during the first five weeks of school, especially with new students,” says Smith, who teaches in both summer and regular sessions. “You know you have another two and a half more terms to work with them.” “The kids come here and hit the ground running,” say Hardej. “They are expected to get up to speed very quickly, develop their skills around the Harkness table and take more responsibility for their own learning. Along the way, the goal is that this group of individuals from around the world will come to see themselves as part of a larger whole, and as part of Exeter.”