ACE Mentoring

Our ACE students hard at work

As is our company policy, we give back whenever we can; and we're continuing that trend with this year's ACE team.  Dave, Nichole, and Lauren represented JKR this year helping to nurture the next generation of architects, contractors and engineers. Today was the scholarship breakfast where all the major companies who participate in the program can get together and meet each other and help raise money for scholarships for the student participants.  This year our team was fortunate enough to have  TWO students win top scholarship prizes of 10,000 dollars!

This is what it's all about...

Our best and brightest student Dan Cruz! So proud!

James Wines, another ACE student of ours, and an awesome saxophonist!

The happy graduates toss their caps.

Izzo Here: A bunch of us have been actively involved in ACE Mentoring for quite a few years now; some of us close to a decade.  For those of you who aren't familiar with ACE, it's an after school mentoring program for high school students who think they may be interested in a career in architecture, construction or engineering. Urffer has even had some of his ACE students come back after attending college to help him lead a team. 

We've been lucky enough to have one great student (actually we've had many), but Daniel Cruz from George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science has stood out as being exceptionally stellar.  Dan joined our ACE team when he was just a lowly shy little freshman, and we've watched him grow each year into a fine young man. We've kept in touch over the years, and I'm happy to say he's been accepted to a number of great colleges and universities and received some sizeable scholarships.  He'll be attending Temple University in the fall and will be majoring in Architecture. I guess we've had some sort of impact on him.  But he deserves all of the credit.  He and his classmates are pretty spectacular; I mean, more than half of the kids in his class got serious scholarship money. By serious I am talking full rides. And by serious I mean, one classmate got a $500,000 Gates Millennium Scholarship which will pay for his entire education through his PhD!


I was honored to be one of his invited guests to his graduation ceremony this morning at Bright Hope Baptist Church and I look forward to being invited to his college graduation in the future.  The kid's going places!  

ACEtastic Final Presentation!

 

Marissa Here:  Last week Dave, Lauren E., and I watched proudly as our 13 ACE students presented their final project at the ACE Student Presentation.  Since meeting the students in early November, they have worked on developing a mixed use project as part of Philly LIVE! Complex.  It has been a wonderful experience to watch the students develop concept layouts and embrace the “Rocketship” design.  They have learned to produce bubble diagrams, column-beam diagrams, truss (not truffle) designs, and elevations.  As a new ACE mentor, it was an added bonus to learn more about the other mentors’ professions.  Great job Team 5!!!

Check us out @ the ACE Breakfast

Lauren Here: This year's ACE Scholarship breakfast was held at the new National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall.   Jerry, Paul, Dave, Marissa, Tiff, Mike and I attended.  After the breakfast we were free to take a tour of this awesome building!  We checked out some of the display areas and got a closer look at the cool architectural details.