By Elizabeth May

Walking down a hallway in one of Virginia's public high schools, there are no real surprises—painted metal lockers, ceramic wall tile, shiny black-and-white flecked floors. But, if you look up, there is something quite unusual—ceiling panel after ceiling panel of the periodic table of elements, individually hand-drawn by the school's students.

This may be your first clue that this is no ordinary school.

Further inspection would turn up more evidence. Instead of seeing students puttering around the halls with bathroom passes, you'd see them crouched on hallway floors, using the wide-open space to test out their own sophisticated microscope designs for an advanced optics class. Instead of hearing raucous laughter echoing through corridors, you might see a glowing blue light coming from an astronomy course in the school's own planetarium, or catch a glimpse of brain wave monitoring taking place in a neuroscience research lab.

None of these activities would surprise physics teacher James Rose (S'70). He's been a faculty member at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., since its creation in 1985. "I work more on problem solving with the students than anything else," says Rose, who majored in physics. Oftentimes, he says, his students start to comprehend that physics is everywhere around them. It's in the way a top spins, the phases of the moon, the best way to open a stuck pickle jar. "It's a real thrill," he says, "when students come back and tell me not how much physics they've learned, but, rather, how well they have applied their skills to new problems."

Rose talks enthusiastically about his college days when he studied physics, remembering the professors and courses that made an impact on him, the friends he got to know, and the good times he shared. But he also remembers something else—how appreciative he was to receive a scholarship funded by a university alumnus. It made such an impression that today he, too, gives to his alma mater.

Most alumni like Rose realize that their donations help fund scholarships, professorships, research, and facilities. But what they may not realize is that their donations impact national university rankings, including those put out by U.S. News and World Report, considered by many to be the most prominent of the annual college rankings. U.S. News and World Report measures, in part, the percentage of overall alumni giving, which it considers to be an indirect measure of student satisfaction. An increased percentage of donors can actually move Carnegie Mellon, currently ranked 22nd, up the rankings list.

For Rose, his support of Carnegie Mellon is not just financial. He acts as an advocate as well. Many of his TJHSST students end up at Carnegie Mellon. With Rose's recommendation—and Carnegie Mellon's recruiting at TJHSST, which was recently named the number one high school in the nation for the third year in a row by U.S. News and World Report—many TJHSST students enroll at Carnegie Mellon. During the current academic year, there are 19 TJHSST grads in the freshman class alone—with about 50 TJHSST students overall attending the university.

"Carnegie Mellon," Rose says simply, "is a good choice for my students."