Thomas County Central High School senior Celia “C’lee” Kornegay had a “humbling” experience this summer. Kornegay, as a junior, was selected to attend the prestigious Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, held this year at Berry College.
“GHP was a truly humbling experience because you learn and take classes with top students in Georgia,” she said of her trip. “I realized that there is so much I still have to learn.”
The program was everything Kornegay expected “and so much more.”
“It was amazing to learn with others who were also passionate about science,” she explained. “As a minor we were supposed to step out of our comfort zone, so I minored in World Languages. I enjoyed pushing myself to learn throughout both my major and minor.”
Kornegay, like other attendees, selected one class to attend for the entire program and rotated through other classes on a four-day basis. Her focus class was Epidemiology and Public Health, an area of science she said is not typically taught in schools.
“The epidemiology class did not focus only on scientific facts and knowledge, but it also included political connections,” Kornegay said. “It was interesting to make this connection and be able to discuss ideas in an open, receptive setting. A lot of what we learned came directly from completing experiments and drawing knowledge from them rather than using the experiments as a way to prove what we already know. Some of the topics discussed were things that we are not taught in a typical classroom.”
Epidemiology students were granted access to the college’s microbiology lab and Kornegay enjoyed learning about her chosen subject through the use of advanced equipment in a college setting.
“When doing labs at GHP, we were given more freedom and less supervision than typically found in a high school science lab,” she said. “Being forced to set up and complete experiments without much help from teachers improved my confidence in my own knowledge and independence in my experimentations.”
A program requirement in her field of study was to select and conduct an experiment. Kornegay and her partner chose to test chlorine concentration to determine the lowest level that would kill E. coli. The inspiration for their project came after their epidemiology teacher shared a story about an outbreak of illness at a water park after E. coli from a baby’s soiled diaper spread through the water and made people sick.
“As we began researching, we learned that chlorine concentrations in pools are set at a certain level in order to prevent instances like this from occurring,” Kornegay said. “We tested how effective the lowest concentrations of chlorine were at killing E. coli. We found that the 0.5 ppm (parts per million) concentration was the lowest concentration of chlorine that still killed E. coli efficiently. Typical chlorine concentrations in pools range from 1.0 to 2.0 ppm so the concentration of chlorine at this water park must have been extremely low if the E. coli was able to spread.”
The best part of GHP to Kornegay was “the ability to learn with other students who cared and wanted to be there” just as she did. In class or at social events, participants were able to meet one another and share what they’d learned as well as talk about their lives.
“It was nice getting to talk to people from different majors to share what you learned, and they actually listened,” she said. “Coming from South Georgia, a lot of people had not heard about some of the events or things that we have, so it was interesting getting to share and expand culturally as well as intellectually.”
Kornegay “highly” recommends GHP attendance because it “is a great way to experience how college will be.” However, the atmosphere is “completely unique and not like school,” she adds, because there are no grades or academic pressure. This, she said, gave participants confidence to step outside their box.
“An important lesson I learned was that you will fail before you can succeed, and that is OK,” Kornegay explains. “Being allowed to fail without suffering the consequence of a bad grade allowed for students to push themselves outside of their comfort zones and explore rather than staying ‘in the box’ or on the ‘safe’ side to keep a good grade.”
Kornegay calls GHP “a program that is unique and unlike any other,” and one she wishes was longer and that she could do again.
“Before I left people said, ‘Four weeks? I don’t think I would want to give up four weeks of my summer,’ but it was definitely worth it,” she said. “A quote that people say to describe GHP is ‘A day feels like a week, a week feels like a day, and before you know it, you are back home.’ That is exactly how this experience felt to me.”
The senior adds she “made a great group of friends” from the experience, ones who still talk to and encourage each other, and she’ll hold them as well as her GHP experience “close to me forever.”