Lia Baros, a junior in the Minority Arts & Sciences Program (MASP), will be spending her senior year as a freshman again. Her outstanding academic record and personal achievements so impressed the admissions interviewing team at the ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä School of Dentistry that she was admitted a year early.
Lia will be a student at the Health Sciences Center in the fall, completing her bachelor's degree and starting dental school at the same time.
"I found out in early February," Lia said. "I interviewed on a Monday and on Friday of that same week a lady from the Admissions office called me. She asked me how my day was going and I said it was okay. She said that she would make it a lot better, and she did! I was just dumbfounded--I don't think it hit me right at first."
Officials at the School of Dentistry are excited about Lia's admission as well.
"Lia is an exceptional student," said Denise Kassebaum, interim dean of the School of Dentistry. "With over 900 applications annually, the School of Dentistry reserves such early acceptance for a very select few individuals. Her qualifications and personal attributes are very impressive. We are absolutely delighted that she will be joining our entering class in August of 1999."
Lia's early entrance into dental school is no surprise to Alphonse Keasley, MASP director.
"Lia is probably one of the most outstanding students that we've had," he said. "After her freshman year she was invited to go to Houston to work in a biomedical center. This is totally unheard of for a young student who had just completed her freshman year. Lia also had about eight offers last summer for internships, including ones from Harvard and Yale. She had this wonderful situation of having to choose which one to go to."
Lia always knew that she wanted to go to college.
"It was instilled in me by my parents, but they never pressured me," she said. "They were the first generations in their family to go to school."
She also always knew that she was going to be a doctor or a dentist. Her dad is a dentist, and when she was younger she wanted to be different. But that changed this year, though her parents never pressured her about her decision.
Lia, who is from Colorado Springs, wanted to attend a large university in the state. She had been tracking ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder's athletic and academic programs and decided to apply without visiting any other state schools. She entered ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä and the MASP program in 1996 and majored in biology. In fall 98 she had a cumulative grade-point average of 3.9.
Lia participated in a Harvard Medical School internship program at the end of her sophomore year and worked in the transplant unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
On the ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder campus, and especially in MASP, Lia is known as a tremendously giving young person.
"She is an incredibly talented young woman," Keasley said. "And the part that's so nice, and I've said this in her letters of recommendation, is that she's unpretentious. So outside as well as within she is acknowledged for her tremendous success academically and as a human being."
The MASP program continues to grow. Now MASP leaders hope to move into their next phase, which involves bringing in the Humanities component of the program.
"We're primarily emphasizing the sciences and mathematics for all entering freshmen," Keasley said. "Our mission is to increase the number of students of color, or those who are underrepresented in the sciences. Now we're looking at what we need to do to get ready for the next phase, which will probably be fall 2000. We want to create a series of co-seminars that will be supportive of our students and will really give them that advance exploration in the academic subject matter."
With goals like these, there's no doubt that many more students like Lia Baros will continue to bring pride to the ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder campus.