Amphibious Achievement

is an athletic and academic mentorship program for high school students in the greater Boston area. Through a combination of coaching in rowing and swimming and a focus on college-preparatory academics, we work to expand higher education opportunities for students. Our students, called Achievers in the program, learn how to translate the grit, discipline, and confidence taught in athletics into the classroom and are equipped with the mentorship and skills necessary to graduate high school and succeed beyond it. This program is completely student-run by MIT undergraduates and is free of cost to all students who participate.

Logistics

Amphibious Achievement runs 9 Sundays out of the semester (not during the summer) from 8:30am - 1:30pm, in person on MIT campus. Athletics feature swimming or rowing, with an emphasis on learning the process and striving for progress week-to-week. Academics features a lesson on a diverse topic curated by our mentor corps, followed by our Deep Dive portion, which entails 1-on-1 mentorship where Achievers and mentors dive into topics/tutoring that they find interesting.

Athletics

We believe that our sports, swimming and rowing, are parallel and are complementary to the lessons that we teach in the classroom. These sports can teach grit: the ability to overcome setbacks and push through challenges. Additionally, these sports are typically less-accessible for many of the students in our program. We coach students with a spectrum of abilities in these sports—from those who have never picked up an oar or taken a stroke in a pool to those who compete in the sport regularly.

Academics

A primary goal of the program is to develop a love of learning amongst our students. We have lessons every session on interesting and less-frequently-taught topics to spark curiosity from our students. Some past lessons include the ramifications of editing the human genome, methods of rhetoric using ethos, basics of how the stock market functions, and writing basic computer programs in scratch. Our 1 to 1 mentor to Achiever ratio maximizes student engagement and allows for personalized mentorship and exploration.

Deep Dive

At the end of each session, we allocate time to spend with our students on whatever they would like to focus on. For many of our juniors, this will be the college process (e.g., searching for colleges, filling out the common application, writing essays, understanding Financial Aid). For others, this may be homework help, further exploration of the lesson of the day, or understanding post-high school paths that are not a traditional 4-year University.

Mentorship

One of the most valuable parts of the program is our ability to be a mentor for our students. Each student in the program is paired with exactly one mentor, their resource to lean on and take advantage of. The mentor will meet and speak with their student throughout the week, be a role model for them, and be a resource whenever they are needed.