Audio recording clip of interview with Dr. William Sullivan by Claytee D. White, December 20, 2006

Upward Bound is designed to take kids — you enroll them in Upward Bound in ninth, tenth and 11th grade. They come to school every weekend, up to the university on the weekends. Every Saturday we have something going on except for holiday weekends, of course. We bring them up here. The idea is to help them in their current classes. So we enroll them in classes where they're having difficulty, whether it's calculus, trigonometry or biology, whatever it is. Or you can get ahead. Like right now this summer many of our kids are taking courses with us that they're going to have in regular school next year, especially if it's a difficult class. Math and science are the two areas, and physics, that are extremely difficult. So we prepare them. When they start out in the fall, they're going to hit the floor running. They're going to be up to snuff. So the Upward Bound program is probably our best-known, most intrusive program we operate. We invite the parents up. So after attending every Saturday in the summertime, those kids who want to and parents who will let them actually move in the residence halls over here on campus. Every parent will not (indiscernible) stay here. So we have a commuter program for them where they bring them up every day, pick them up every afternoon. We feed them breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they go to class. (End Side A.) We do not force all the kids to stay in the dorms. And some of our seniors as I was saying, they have jobs. So we allow them to work and go to school because we're trying to give them the exact type of setting they may face when they go to college because remember all these are either poor kids or the first-generation kids. So chances are they will have to learn to work and go to college at the same time. We have what's called the Bridge program in Upward Bound. That's where the kids have graduated like right now from high school and are about to start college. Well, that's a bridge 13 between high school and college. We have enrolled them in actual UNLV classes. And so they're taking courses right now and coming back and telling the other kids this is serious, you know. College is a lot different. So then when they go off to college, there are courses that they're taking that will transfer with them if they go off or if they stay here. So that's the courses that they're in. Oh, I love this. I love it. Now, tell me about the NASA program. Ah, the NASA program. Ooh, that's for our little geniuses. They actually have people who have worked in NASA here running a weeklong program for high school kids. So we enroll our kids in it. Dr. Fernard has worked with my staff. And they have set it up where these kids get an intensive one-week training on everything that can lead toward being an astronaut, everything it takes to run the Jet Propulsion Lab, physics and math and chemistry, all that stuff. They do one week for high school and one week for middle school. One of my other programs has middle school kids in it. Our middle school kids are starting this week in it. Last week it was my high school kids. It's a terrific program. Oh, I love it. How many kids do you have in the NASA program this summer? I think we have about 15 of our kids in the NASA program. Wonderful. Now, what is STEM? STEM is science, technology, engineering and math. And the STEM program, we're involving our kids, again, with the scientists here at the university - the math department, the science department, the engineering department. And they're running their separate program with our high school kids as well. These kids are getting some intensive, intensive training.