t’s 6am on a Saturday morning and where would you find most college students? In bed, right?! Not this Staten Island resident. Kinu Yamamoto, an architecture student at The Cooper Union for the Advancement for Science and Art—one of the most selective colleges in the country—sets her alarm to sound before the sun rises and catches the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan where she is trying to give back to the program that helped her get her first break.

Cooper Union’s Saturday Outreach Program, founded in 1968 by the college’s undergraduates and administered by Cooper Union professors from the School of Art, is a tuition-free, year-round curriculum created for New York City high school students, most from under-served school districts and communities, with exposure to an art education that otherwise might not be available. Of the 450 students in the program, the enrollment is approximately 40% African American, 30% Latino, 20% Asian American, and 10% European American, with 50% of the students of each gender.

“Coming to Cooper Union on Saturdays, while I was still in high school, exposed me to so many different ways of expressing myself such as creative writing, 3-dimensional drawing and sketching from a live model. These were new experiences that taught me how to be a practical and abstract thinker, which ultimately gave me direction and encouraged me to pursue a career in architecture,” said Kinu Yamamoto.Of Cooper Union’s Saturday Outreach Program, approximately 80%f the 150 Program’s seniors were accepted into college or professional school. Kinu credits the Saturday Outreach Program as the pivotal influence that helped her to focus and choose architecture and, for this reason, she wants to help other students the way in which the program helped her.

For more information about Cooper's Union's Saturday Outreach Program,
visit www.cooper.edu or call 212 353-4108.

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