Annual Report 2023

Table Of Contents

y4: Jazmin Morales

Rodriguez 20'

A Letter from The ED

Dear Hamilton Community,

What a year it's been! As we reflect on the journey of 2023 and eagerly anticipate the road ahead in 2024, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the remarkable resilience, growth, and impact of our Scholars and our entire community.

This past year, our Scholars have shown incredible strength and determination as they navigated the challenges and opportunities on their educational journeys. They've embraced every obstacle as an opportunity, demonstrating resilience in the face of adversity and courage in pursuit of their dreams. In 2023, we witnessed the remarkable achievements of our Scholars as they navigated the challenges of high school, college, and beyond. Their resilience, strength, and courage are a testament to the transformative power of education and mentorship.

In 2023, we welcomed a new cohort of high-achieving change makers, each bringing their unique strengths, talents, and perspectives to our community. Together, they have enriched our program, inspired our team, and reminded us of the transformative power of education and service-oriented leadership.

As we look forward to 2024, I am filled with excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead. Our community is stronger than ever, with 562 Alumni and 152 active Scholars paving the way for future generations. With your continued support, we will empower our newest cohort of Scholars to unlock their full potential, pursue their passions, and make a lasting impact on the world around them as they join our HamFam’s 152 active Scholars.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you who has contributed to our mission over the past year. Your generosity, dedication, and belief in the power of education have fueled our success and brought us closer to our shared vision of a more just and equitable world.

Together, let's continue Empowering youth. Cultivating changemakers. Advancing equity.

With love and light,

Angela

MISSION: Empowering high-achieving, underserved young leaders to thrive in college and beyond.

VISION: A community of ethical leaders who break barriers to build an equitable society.

90%

first generation college students

race/ethnicity

avg. household income

42k

2022 national median income

74k

Regional Distribution

As a young boy living in northeast Iraq’s Kurdistan more than a decade ago, Najman Mahbouba’s family was caught between rival militia fighting. As such, they applied for asylum in the United States.

After their house was spray painted and shots were fired through it, he said, they were permitted to leave for Jordan and eventually California. He was 7.

Now Najman is 18, a high school senior in Los Gatos, CA, and a 2023 Hamilton Scholar. He said he has been accepted to Harvard and is waiting on a few other college decisions

He recalls spending three hours a day at the public library across from his school, and that he grew appreciative of America’s many resources. “I have a lot of family in Iraq. There are a lot of difficulties in Iraq. Here there are so many resources, libraries, paved roads, streetlights, colleges.”

Thus, he said, he developed a passion for studying and improving public policy around the world and became active with others in The Policy Initiatives Institute organization.

He was drawn to AHS, he said, partly because he was reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, another immigrant. “I liked his legacy of public service,” Najman said.

He also liked his first leader week trip to New York and staying up all night talking with other members of the cohort. “It was very exciting to me,” he said. Eventually, Najman plans to get a Ph.D. in public policy and work at the intersection of policy-making and academia.

Born in San Diego, Camila’s family soon moved 10 minutes back across the border to live in Mexico because it was cheaper, she said. But they moved back to the U.S. because of the insecurity there.

At Southwest High School, many of the students commuted from Mexico, Camila recalled. Growing up on the border, where not many Latinos had access to higher education, motivated her to excel in class.

Camila had an inspiration for her ambition to become a physician: Jose Montano, a boy in the neighborhood who was stricken and later died of brain cancer. His family started a foundation in his honor, where she volunteered.

She also had a role model: Her cousin, Azul Marmolejo, was valedictorian at Southwest in 2021, attends Harvard, and plans to be a physician.

Camila followed the same path. She was valedictorian at Southwest last year, was accepted early at Harvard, and wants to treat cancer patients like Jose.

AHS helped her, she said, particularly by “inspiring” its scholars to reach for more competitive choices. She fondly remembers meeting other Hammies on her first trip out of California. Because she was from a high school made up mainly of students from Mexico, the AHS program “let me get to know students with different ethnicities from all over the country. It was very special to me.”

In that essay he addressed how he was able to reconcile his “isolation from more public social circles at school” with his easier “acceptance within my Armenian friend groups.”

Though his parents were born in Syria, they had many Armenian friends there and grew up speaking the language and teaching it and his heritage to him and his sister, he said.

Yacoub is adding urban studies courses alongside his computer science courses to learn more about how tech can be ethically applied at a massive scale to help cities function more efficiently.

He also has been working with the campus newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, and its website. “I liked their reach,” he said. “Everyone knows it” He is on its masthead as one of two web design and development editors.

Over the summer, he said anticipates playing more of a “product manager role” with a nonprofit called New Voters, the organization will be working with the NYC Public Schools district as well as collaborating with other voter tech nonprofits over the summer.

Yacoub Kahkajian says he chose computer science as a career path so he could “make the web more accessible to everyone.”

“Part of what incentivized me,” he said, was that his parents didn’t have the language proficiency or computer skills to seek jobs in the new internet age after they emigrated from Syria to Washington DC’s Maryland suburbs in 2000.

He was born there in 2004 and when he was 4 or 5 he was using the family desktop computer so much they moved it into his room.

He recalled that his affinity for drawing as a child led him to web design. While at Poolesville he started creating short videos for the Poynter Institute’s “fact-checking network” to run on TikTok and YouTube. The idea was to show viewers how to be skeptical about bold claims and how to check them.

Not surprisingly, Yacoub discovered AHS on the internet. He was picked as a Hammie in 2021 and is now a sophomore at Princeton.

“I don’t think I would have had the courage to even try” to get into Princeton, without AHS staff help and encouragement, he said. “Give a ‘shout out’ to Lynell (Engelmyer). She was absolutely incredible when it came to revising my college essay.”

A 2020 Alexander Hamilton Scholar, Jazmin was born in Salem, Oregon. after her parents moved there from Mexico 25 years ago. She’s now a junior at Pomona College outside Los Angeles, majoring in public policy and Chicano, Latino studies. She also wants to go to law school. She says she appreciates the sacrifices her parents made for her, her mother was working as a waitress and her father worked in the fields harvesting crops.

When Jazmin found AHS during a college prep session in high school, “It was the mentorship and trips that got my attention,” she said. “I hadn’t traveled that much outside of Oregon and California. So I really enjoyed that.”

She wrote her college essay, with AHS editing help, to salute her family’s work, she said.

“I have a love/hate relationship with broccoli,” she added, citing her aunt taking her to pick the vegetable in the fields. “That was the hardcore version.” She also recalled bonding with a friendly older woman who was working in the fields to save for retirement.

Her father took her to the fields, she said, to show how he worked hard there so she and her brother could have a better life. That in turn keeps her working hard too “so maybe one day I can give back because they have done so much for me.”

That’s also why she added Chicano, Latino studies as a major, to learn more about herself and her culture. She is now studying in Yucatan, Mexico and has visited nearby Mayan cities.

Tyon, a 2019 Hammie, was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles and graduated from the nearby all-boys Verbum Dei Jesuit High School. He is now a senior at California State University, Fullerton, and plans to pursue a profession in Human Resources (HR).

After first thinking about real estate or marketing, Tyon said he shifted his focus while on a high school internship at a financial company. Students sampled several departments and he said he became “fascinated” with HR. He also felt it fit in with the AHS program goal of doing something positive that has a lasting effect on people.

His most attention-grabbing personal essay for college applications, he said, described what it was like growing up in south central LA. He described the fear he felt when the neighbor's home was raided by police, right next door to his family’s duplex. He wrote how he wanted to make a “better way for myself” and to use his business skills to help other individuals who come from marginalized communities.

Tyon recalls he was accepted to the vast majority of the colleges where he applied. He said he didn’t want to take on the debt needed to pay for some of the private schools. He picked Fullerton because of its “robust” business programs.

College is now running in his family. His twin brother goes to the University of California Los Angeles, his older brother goes to the University of California Merced, and his sister graduated from California State at Humboldt.

“It’s been great to have a resource like AHS,” he said. And through periodic meetings with Hammies “there are a couple of scholars I consider close friends of mine.”

2023

2018 Cohort Grad Stats

77%

OF 2018 HAMMIES TO GRADUATE DEBT FREE

$4,600

AVERAGE DEBT OF

AHS SCHOLAR UPON GRADUATION

$37,090

AVERAGE DEBT OF US STUDENTS UPON GRADUATION

AHS Empowerment Program retention rate

79%

2018 Scholar data is presented as this is our most recent college graduating cohort.

where our 2018

hammies attended

51%

Growing up in Long Beach, CA, Eileen credits her parents’ emphasis on education, and their resourcefulness--as refugees from Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia--for helping her test into her high school’s magnet program.

“I spent almost all my free time at the public library,” she said, including helping her mother copy entire library textbooks so she could get ahead start on the next school year.

The magnet program carried with it an expectation that all the students would attend college, she recalled. It also helped her accelerate her affinity for numbers and take college-level courses at the local community college.

She credits the Alexander Hamilton Scholars community for helping her “dream bigger” and apply to colleges that seemed “out of reach.”

That led her to Stanford, where she studied math, science, and engineering and was introduced to the Stanford duck syndrome: where students try to look placid on the surface, while they paddle frantically beneath it to keep up.

“I remember being thoroughly unprepared for my first quarter finals,” Eileen recalled because she hadn’t adapted her study habits to the level of rigor Stanford STEM classes required.

“I simply underestimated just how different a playing field Stanford engineering would be.” Her parents had taught her self-reliance, so she had to learn to ask for help, a “humbling experience” for one used to being a tutor to others.

The “Palo Alto Pond” also introduced her to overseas travel for the first time: studying in China, a summer internship in Taiwan, and a class trip that included stops in Washington, London, and Stockholm.

Another internship was at Morgan Stanley with AHS founder George Cox, which Eileen called “highly pivotable” in showing her what working in finance was like. She originally wanted to pursue a “highly technical” career, but the new experience showed her she could build relationships with clients and still “crunch the numbers.”

After receiving her B.S. degree in Management Science & Engineering she went to the University of California at Berkeley and received an MBA degree in 2019.

Along the way, she has worked at Hyundai Capital, in Seoul, South Korea, and Orange County, California, MUFG, a Japanese financial company, and was a student instructor in impact investing while in business school.

She is now on the investments team at Calvert Impact Capital, a global nonprofit investment firm, where she specializes in community development.

Juan Trujillo, a 2016 Hammie, moved to Oklahoma City from Mexico with his parents in the early 2000s. They shared a house with several other relatives, which forced him to “grow up quickly,” he recalls. “I wasn’t watching cartoons. I was treated as an adult.”

His goal initially was to make it through high school, and then work in construction, as his father did. He wanted to go to college, but wasn’t sure he could find the money to pay for it because he was undocumented.

So he set out to get his name in the news, he said, to build his “social media profile, in the hopes college officials would notice him.

As a sophomore at U.S. Grant High School, he began running cross country and joined LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), which he said was like a mentorship to him. “They treated me like a little brother.”

In 2016, he was picked as an Alexander Hamilton Scholar. He said that the “PDP,” or personal development program, was particularly helpful in helping him set goals for 1, 5, and 10 years ahead. And the announcement was covered by Spanish-language television, he said.

Later that year he was in the news again when he was selected as one of 18 high school students to be a member of Oklahoma City’s “Youth Council,” representing his city council ward.

Early in 2017, the Oklahoman, his hometown newspaper, featured Juan in a story about challenges facing youths like him in his southwest city zip code, 73119. More teenagers from that neighborhood ended up in custody than anywhere else in the state.

After graduating from high school he moved 30 miles away to Norman to study engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He started well, but encountered a crisis in the spring of 2019.

Juan said he was hospitalized for a week with symptoms of depression and anxiety, and had to leave the engineering school for a year and a half. “I was just not in a good mental state,” he added.

“I didn’t really tell anyone,” including AHS, about his problem, he said.

He stayed a full-time student taking business courses to maintain his scholarships. And he received his green card as a permanent resident during the same period, opening a path to citizenship.

By the spring of 2021 he was back in engineering classes and was able to travel and study abroad and work at internships.

“I feel just as motivated as I was when I was in my last few years of high school,” he said, adding that he’s back on track to graduate this spring with a B.S. in engineering.

emergency fund

In 2023, AHS provided crucial support to our Scholars by disbursing $17,829 in emergency funds. These funds served as a lifeline, addressing urgent needs such as food and shelter insecurities, unexpected fees, medical expenses, and transportation.

It's essential to recognize that many students may not vocalize their need for additional support. Despite the challenges they face, including escalating tuition fees, inflation, and reductions in college aid, some students navigate extenuating family circumstances and bureaucratic hurdles without seeking assistance.

AHS TeaM

The Council of Advisors serves as critical community champions in support of our mission. Members lean-in in a variety of ways: sharing their professional expertise; their diverse knowledge of constituent perspectives; their connections to local, national, or international resources, colleagues or peers; providing philanthropic support, or other forms of needed assistance.

Shereese braun

Dr. Vin Gupta

Dr. Carolyn walker hopps

Dr. Frank j. Popper

Dr. Deborah popper

Rhonda lewis

Marta Lowe

patrick green

Dr. jillian woodruff

rachel schnalzer

matt stewart

alexis cox

kellie tollifson

Alexandra Woods

Luisa Santons

Bill basl

Shirley mckinney

dee simons

Board of Directors

Arthur Hollingsworth

Rashid Farrel

President

Vice President

Jessica Goldman

Secretary

Jason Lynch

TREASURER

George Cox

Founder and Development Director

Mackenzie Welch

Board Member

Betsy Maurer

Board Member/ Dev COMMITTEE Chair

Rebecca Bennett

Board Member

sponsors