January 26, 2006

Home-Schooled Sensation

Julie Boiko selected as semi-finalist in Intel
science competition

By Lorraine Gabbert
Staff Writer

It isn’t every 17-year-old who is selected as a semi-finalist in Intel’s Science Talent Search, a research-based project competition for high school seniors, but then Julie Boiko isn’t just any teenager.

Intel’s Science Talent Search prize patrol awarded Julie a $1,000 scholarship for being a semi-finalist in their competition on Jan. 11th. A gift of $1,000 was also awarded to the San Jose Unified School District in her name. (Photo courtesy of Julie Boiko)

“Just getting this far is thrilling,” she says. Only 300 of 1500 students become semi-finalists. On January 11, Intel named its contest semi-finalists on their Web site at noon, but first they called to notify each student’s high school principal. As Julie is home-schooled, they called her mother, Denise. “At 11:15 am, my mom came running, shouting, ‘You’re a semi-finalist!’” she says.

Like the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol, Intel representatives arrived at her home in Almaden Valley with an oversize check for $1,000 and a flurry of blue and white balloons.

As a semi-finalist for her ‘Allogeneic Antibodies Develop from Donor Hematopoietic Stem Cells’ lab project, Julie not only received a $1,000 scholarship, but $1,000 was also awarded to the San Jose Unified School District in her name, to be used for science or technology.

Besides being named an Intel semi-finalist, Julie is also a semi-finalist in the Siemens Westinghouse competition, which promotes excellence by encouraging high school students to undertake research projects in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.

Of course, these accomplishments didn’t happen by chance, but as a result of Julie’s hard work. She has intelligence and initiative to spare. As does her mother, Denise, who home-schooled Julie and her younger brother, Steve.

Julie has achieved more in her 17 years than some do in a lifetime. A high school senior, she has already taken college courses and interned at Stanford University’s Department of Medicine. She has been accepted for college at St. Mary’s and Stanford University and is waiting to hear from Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Rice.

Her mother couldn’t be more proud. “I have rarely seen someone more motivated than she is,” says Denise. “It’s exciting to see her take ownership of her education. She’s the one who’s taken the lead and found these opportunities.”

Home-schooling: A mother and daughter team effort
A biology major in college, Denise Boiko followed her passion working as a medical technologist and in product development for colon cancer screenings. With the birth of her children, she turned her talents to consulting work, coordinating data and writing protocols for clinical studies.

That all changed when she heard about home-schooling and found a new career as her children’s teacher. “I found it intriguing,” says Denise, “and a way to spend as much time as possible with my children, while teaching them Christian values.”

Denise believes that home-schooling allows children to learn at their own pace according to their own learning styles, and is more efficient than a classroom setting where the teacher has to divide her attention between a large number of students.

In 1993, she started home-schooling kindergarten for her daughter Julie. “You can’t go wrong with kindergarten,” she says with a laugh.

She initially planned to home-school Julie until third grade, but as that came and went, she decided to continue until junior high school. At the start of fifth grade, Julie considered returning to school, thinking it would be fun to be in a classroom like other kids. “I wanted to be like my friends,” she explains. “I wasn’t dissatisfied with home-schooling, I just wanted to go to the same school they did.”

Her parents decided to wait and see if that was what she truly wanted. After about a year, Julie changed her mind when she realized she could structure her own curriculum. She tore through her literature-based history studies, choosing to learn about ancient, then medieval and then United States history. She also had the opportunity to take high school science classes at home, while still in middle school, allowing her to jump ahead.

“She got over that little hump and realized she could go after her goals, which she might not have been able to do as easily in a traditional school,” says Denise. From that point on, it was full-speed ahead, with Denise committed to continuing Julie’s home-schooling through high school.

Although she was home-schooled, Julie still socialized with other kids through sports, church and clubs. She made crafts and put on plays with the Home-school Girl’s Club, was a member of Shadowbrook’s swim team, church choir and AWANA kid’s club. She also belonged to the California chapter of the Home-School Honor Society, taught a Shakespeare class for other home-schoolers, and played on a home-school sports league.

Denise believes that home-schooling is a growing movement for parents who feel a need to spend one-on-one time with their children as students, teach personal values, and minimize negative peer pressure. “There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of home-school families in the Bay Area,” she says. For these families, a home-school graduation is held every June, as well as outings, a senior banquet and even a prom.

Most home-schooled students go through a private school independent study program. They also follow state standards and take standardized tests. “Both of my kids tested high on the standardized tests,” says Denise. In fact, when Julie started taking the new SATs in ninth grade, she scored 2290 out of a maximum of 2400 points.

Denise believes that her daughter is glad she stuck with home-schooling as she was able to design her education. “Home-schooling isn’t for everyone,” says Julie, “but it’s worked for me and I think it could work for other people.”

West Valley College
In eighth grade, Julie reviewed which colleges would meet her career goals and researched what she needed to do to attend the schools of her choice. As Advanced Placement (AP) courses were a must to qualify for these competitive schools, she took the necessary classes at home as well as at West Valley Community College. Her mother also took AP training classes at the AP Institute. “You have to be proactive,” says Denise.

At age 13, Julie started college, taking classes at West Valley Community College. She got her feet wet with Algebra 1, which she had previously studied at home, and was the top student in the class of high school graduates.

The following fall she signed up for a biology study skills class, and after taking several classes from her instructor, Dr. Roberta Berlani, she developed a close relationship as a mentor to Julie.

“Roberta has been a great source of encouragement for me,” says Julie. “She’s brilliant, but down to earth, and her classes are more of a discussion than a lecture. She inspires her students with her enthusiasm.”

Julie surprised her teacher with her ability to draw conclusions. “It’s an incredible thing to get when you’re 13,” says Berlani, who was further impressed when Julie excelled in her demanding cell biology class. “For my money, it’s one of the hardest courses at West Valley,” she says. “It relies on a chemistry and biology background, and Julie was outstanding.”

At the top of her class, Julie became a tutor in chemistry, biology and math through calculus, working with classmates who were college age and above. Although she was young, the students also knew she had a keen understanding of the subject matter.

Berlani credits home-schooling with Julie’s sense of confidence and rapport with her professors and classmates. “For me, a highlight of teaching is having students like Julie and watching them go off and do really well,” she says. “It’s a surprise when anyone that young succeeds so well, but Julie did it because that’s the way she is.”

Award Winning Research
Science captivates Julie. In seventh and eighth grade, when she was on a home-school debate team, she focused on diseases like the Bubonic Plague for her subject matter, and when she took her first biology class in eighth grade, she thought it was ‘kind of cool.’ “So much of my interest in science is just from my sense of wonder in creation,” she says, “and the design behind everything from trees to animals to antibodies.”

Julie at work in the Center for Clinical Immunology lab at Stanford University. (Photo courtesy of Julie Boiko)

Hoping to attend medical school one day, Julie was thrilled to be selected for a summer internship at the Center for Clinical Immunology (CCIS) at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. It was also the solution to finding a faculty member to provide her with a science project to enter in Siemens Westinghouse and Intel’s Science Talent Search competitions. There, she worked alongside Dr. David Miklos in a bone marrow transplant research lab.

Miklos, who had been a competition semi-finalist himself, gladly assisted Julie with her scientific paper and lab project, which focused on cases in which transplanted bone marrow rejects the recipient. Although it is widely recognized that T-cells play a part in graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and killing cancer, they hypothesized that there was also another cell, which they called the B-cell, which created antibodies. “You want to preserve the good effects of a bone marrow transplant, which is killing off the cancer cells,” says Julie, “but you don’t want it to reject the person. Hopefully, this will lead to immunotherapies that preserve the cancer-fighting abilities of bone marrow transplants while minimizing the detrimental effects of GVHD.”

At Stanford, during her eight-week internship, in addition to working on her pet project, Julie attended immunology lectures in areas like Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and cancer. At the same time, she was also taking college classes at West Valley College, and commuting an hour and a half each way by bus and train between the two.

She continued working on her lab work following her internship, sometimes long into the night or on weekends, waiting for the results she was hoping for. Her persistence paid off, as finally, promising results showed mere days before the project, along with a 20-page paper, was due for the Siemens Westinghouse competition.

Her Intel entry is based upon this work, with some modification. “We really credit the CCIS program for giving high school students these opportunities,” says Denise. “It’s a tremendous program and fully funded by private donation.”

A Bright Future
Now that she’s received some acceptances, college seems that much more real for Julie. She plans to major in biology, like her mom, and pursue clinical research. She’s a little nervous going away from home, but takes comfort in having already had a college experience taking classes at West Valley College.

Down the road, Julie plans to pursue a M.D. and Ph.D. in immunology. “I’m very interested in treating Leukemia or the lymphomas,” she says. “I think I’d get a lot of personal fulfillment in it. There’s a lot of good that can be done in that field.”

Ultimately Julie found out that she was not named a finalist in either the Intel Science Talent Search or the Siemens Westinghouse competitions, however being named a semi-finalist is an incredible accomplishment. “It feels very validating of my home-school experience,” she says. Although these competitions are limited to high school students, there will be other contests and challenges ahead: such as getting into medical school.

For now, as her high school years and home-schooling come to a close, it’s the end of one chapter of her life and the start of another. “I’m getting teary-eyed as we near graduation,” says Denise. “It’s amazing the things we’ve been able to accomplish together and with God’s help. It’s been quite a journey.”