Major Lorena Villarreal sent the following note:  This summer was amazing.  I worked with Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA), a non-profit college-prep program  based in New York City, which seeks to redress inequality of higher educational opportunity for low-income high school juniors across the United States, whose socio-economic, racial and/or ethnic background is currently under-represented at the nation's top colleges and universities.  This summer, the program hosted 60 students at Princeton University where we lived for 8 weeks.  The students learned about leadership, ethics, and politics, while having SAT & ACT prep courses as well.  We traveled to Maryland, Connecticut, Washington DC, Pennsylvania, New York and visited several top universities such as Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Wesleyan.
I participated in this program as a scholar during the summer after my junior year in high school (2005); i can honestly say that LEDA helped me get into Rice and I wanted to give back to this amazing program in any way I could.  It was great being able to  return to LEDA and work as an RA at the dormitory where we all stayed, which allowed me to see everything from a different perspective from the one I lived four years ago. I had a group of students assigned to me and this proximity gave me the opportunity to witness their transformation as individuals into a tight-knit community.  It was beautiful.  I learned so much from working with talented and driven students and met so many amazing people that touched my heart. I would not trade this summer experience for anything.