We welcomed 85 boys to the College of Business on the Long Beach State campus on Monday, July 16 for our 5th BOSS™. Highlights of Week 1 of the 2-week experience, where we begin our year-round engagement with the boys, included amazing presentations by Fresno State track standout turned Dartmouth MBA turned Wall Street financier and motivational speaker Ramsey Jay, Jr.; Former college basketball player turned medical doctor and jet pilot/flight surgeon, Dr. Clarence M. Lee; former college baseball/basketball player turned national (pharmaceuticals) sales director turned author and business coach, JaMarr Brown; Former LSU Tiger linebacker turned founder of Maclin Motivation’s Justin Maclin and NBA referee Derek Richardson; A visit to Dodgers Stadium and a 9th inning rally to beat the Angels; A trip to Port of Long Beach headquarters that included breakout sessions with communications, construction, government relations, engineering and technology professionals, lunch and a harbor tour where the boys learned about Port operations, the complexities of maritime goods movement and how the Port is improving the environment and helping the community thrive.
We started our annual Math Madness (middle schoolers) competition, a takeoff of March Madness where boys compete by solving increasingly more difficult math problems. At the end of Week 1, Jakob Brannon (Newcomb), Angel Cervantes(Jackie Robinson/LBUSD) and David Caldwell (Lifeline Education/Compton) were leading the way. We also kicked off our first robotics program, led by LBUSD’s Tarquinn Curry and including a special presentation by Cisco engineer Jeff Freeman, founder and leader of Innovos Robotics, with a view towards developing a competitive BOSS robotics team. The youngsters made great progress towards building and coding race cars that will compete on Day 10 of the camp. We closed out Week 1 with an amazing basketball clinic presented by the Lakers Youth Foundation.
Highlights of Week 2 include VIP visit to Rams’ training camp and 2 days (week following end of 2-week camp) at The Aerospace Corporation as part of their “Launch to Success” program, where the boys will learn about current and future space technology and participate in hands-on learning. Our robotics MVP was BOSS newcomer, Jordan Simmons. Ian Harrison and Emilio Farrell, both headed to CAMS (California Academy for Math & Science), Immanuel Ivory, Raymond Jenkins and Eli Walters joined Jordan on our All-Robotics team. BOSS newcomer Angel Cervantes is our Math Madness MVP, setting a record with 8,000 points. DJ Orr, London McCall, Memphis Stover, Jason Tillman, David Caldwell and brothers Dylan and Emile Ballard joined Angel on our All-Math Madness team.
Click here for a Google photo gallery and click here for a short video that captures some of the excitement of our 5th BOSS camp. After we take in Chargers and Rams games over the next couple weeks, and the boys return to school, we will transition to the year-round component of our year-round and multi-year BOSS “process” that includes mentoring, real world experiences and opportunities for advocacy and service.
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