St. Paris teen to be teaching aide at prestigious engineering program

While many high school students are spending their summers trying to forget school, Kyle Taylor will be doing the opposite. He’ll be on the other side of the classroom, helping teach.

The Nightingale Montessori senior will spend four weeks this summer in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University as a teaching assistant in its Engineering Innovation program, helping instruct his peers.

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Having been through the program at Clark State in its first year here in 2015 and worked as a teaching assistant there last year, Taylor hopes this will be another step in his eventual goal — to attend Johns Hopkins as an electrical engineering student.

“Going in I always liked math and physics. This program made me want to study engineering,” said Taylor, who is from St. Paris.

Inspired to do more following the first year of the Engineering Innovation program, Taylor applied to be a teaching assistant. Although he knew the program, the experience still offered lessons that made him stronger.

“You have to work hard and achieve to be successful,” he said. “Participating can increase your acceptance rate at colleges if you know you want to be an engineer.”

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During his upcoming assignment at Johns Hopkins, his responsibilities will be similar but he will also need to be accessible to the students who have questions after classes.

“I really understand the difference between college and a high school level class,” said Taylor, who confessed the hardest part for him is being away from home for four weeks, which he’s never done.

Having already taken college-level classes the past two years at Clark State Community College, he’ll take all his senior year courses there. His goal is to complete his college prerequisites with the hopes of graduating with an associate’s degree in math.

From there, Taylor hopes he’ll be preparing to attend Johns Hopkins to go study electrical engineering a year from now. But he’d also be happy at the University of Illinois or the Colorado School of Mines studying petroleum engineering.

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