OLA MASTERY PROGRAM
Over the course of Odyssey’s history, the one golden thread that connects all of Odyssey's students receiving full ride academic scholarships to the best schools in the world is their Mastery Program work.
Our Mastery Program students have earned:
$500,000 in full ride scholarships researching social anthropology
$300,000 in full ride scholarships exploring cognitive science
$113,000 in full ride scholarships studying Lincoln and the Civil War
$120,000 in full ride scholarships researching the criminal justice system
$160,000 in full ride scholarships doing research work in Care Ethics
$176,000 in full ride scholarships to the top three art schools in the world
All told, that is $4 million dollars in President’s, Academic Excellence, Chancellor’s, Dean’s, Trustee, and Regent’s scholarship to places like George Washington, NYU, Penn State, Hendrix, SCAD, UC Santa Cruz, Lewis and Clark, Colorado State, Regis, Allegheny, Fisk, and over $800,000 in scholarships for students who did not even take the ACT.
The Mastery Program is designed for highly motivated Odyssey students who have a passionate interest in a specific subject, have a strong desire to grow into disciplined self-learners, and have demonstrated proficient research and writing skills in previous Odyssey courses.
The Mastery Program is designed for those students who want to push themselves above and beyond the rigorous coursework already offered at OLA. Students who achieve the designation of Mastery distinguish themselves by taking our most advanced courses, pursue rigorous scholarly inquiry through our Mastery Program independent studies, and/or engage real world learning opportunities through our Voyage Apprenticeship Program. Our Mastery students are situated for high level work at their university of choice and for entering life as wise, virtuous, and compassionate architects of repair in the world.
The work our students do is on par with what graduates do in their Masters Program and even Doctoral thesis work. In fact, every student who has participated in our Mastery Program program has experienced as much, and, in just about every case, significantly more scholarship, honors, recognition, and college acceptance than students who typically score in the high 30s on their ACTS.
James G giving a spoken word on his Mastery work on race and social inequity
Check out some of the Mastery work done by our students
Corban’s Mastery in Mechanical Engineering
For Corban’s Mastery in Mechanical Engineering, he designed and built a self-balancing reaction wheel! This requires three gyroscopic motors to work in tandem and recalibrate in order to create torque or balance, moving or holding the cube. During this time, Corban focused on: Right and non-right triangle trigonometry and the Trigonomic Functions: circles, radians, Pythagorean Identity, special values, values on the unit circle, sin, cos, tan graphing, Sinusoidal graphing and models, and Tau
James’s Mastery in Social Anthropology
James earned his Mastery in Social Anthropology studying the African American experience and the stories told by the culture over time. Listen to his powerful spoken word on “Steel Cages Made From Zip Codes”!
Annika’s Mastery in Cognitive Science
Annika spent her Mastery year studying cognitive science and the impact of positivity on the brain. Listen to her “TEDEd Talk” here!