Defying odds (and mom), a student wins the right to study science
Sharmin Mollick, a senior at Marble Hill High School for International Studies, works on a physics problem.
All it would take to keep Sharmin Mollick happy for life, it seems, is a good science laboratory.
Mollick’s school, the Marble Hill High School for International Studies, doesn’t have a fully-equipped lab. But for Mollick, even studying science publicly, in the daylight, has been a luxury.
That will change this fall, when 18-year-old Mollick heads to Cornell University to study biochemistry.
Listen to Sharmin Mollick discuss her studies and goals.
Mollick left Bangladesh with her mother and brother at 14, in part to avoid a marriage she said members of her extended family were trying to arrange for her. Like many Bangladeshi girls, Mollick attended primary school but was forced to drop out after seventh grade.
By the time Mollick arrived in New York, she had been out of school for two years. Before she left school, however, a teacher introduced her to basic genetics. “It was fascinating to know something new, because in my country you don’t usually get to talk about science a lot,” she said. “It goes against the beliefs of Islam and it’s a Muslim-dominated culture.”
But Mollick was hooked. “You have questions that you can answer either through experiments or through research, and you still have more questions, and those answers give rise to more questions that you can answer — it just never ends,” Mollick said. “It just never gets boring.”
When she entered Marble Hill as a ninth-grader, she sped through her classes for new English speakers and into classes to prepare her for more advanced science courses. Administrators at Marble Hill, a small school with a
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