Deborah
The January 2022 installment of our Community Spotlight series features former Beam Camper, Deborah. Deborah is a high school senior at STAR Early College and will attend Duke University in the fall. Deborah plans to pursue the pre-med track and wants to become a Trauma Surgeon; her interest in medicine started after she joined the NYU Grossman School of Medicine STEP program. It was in this program where she realized the discrimination minorities face in medical institutions, and she decided she wanted to help change that. In addition to her interest in medicine, Deborah is passionate about art and poetry.
Deborah was first introduced to Beam Center through our school partnerships in 2017-2018 while she was in middle school. She states that this first in-class program gave her artistic liberty and allowed her to express herself fully. Deborah and her group made wooden kites and created their own design exploring diversity.
After being offered a scholarship to Beam Camp, Deborah attended Camp during summer 2018 and 2019. It was here that Deborah was able to explore her interest in spray paint as a medium. Following a smaller scale project in 2018, Deborah returned the following year to create a spray painted a mural on the side of Camp’s Art Barn for her independent project. Speaking of the experience managing this independent project, she said, “I felt the support from all the campers. I lowkey felt like a project director.”
Deborah’s experience at Beam Camp led to an invitation to participate in the project selection process for the next Camp project. Deborah says, “Being part of that decision-making process gave me a different perspective on what it meant to be part of a hands-on project.”
When asked about the impact of her Beam experiences, Deborah says that she walked away with better time management skills and feels more responsible. One of the best parts of Beam, according to Deborah, is that “Adults can talk down to you or they can talk to you; I have never experienced a time at Camp or at Beam where a person has spoken down to me.”
Thank you for being part of Beam, Deborah!