Introducing Edward (Hyun-Seok) Cheon – PHENND’s new intern supporting the GEAR UP CRCC project

Posted by on October 21, 2016

Edward (Hyun-Seok) Cheon currently is a Master of Social Work student at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. For his field practicum, he has joined PHENND as a macro-track intern, working as the GEAR UP Coordinator for Overbrook High School (under the GEAR UP CRCC project) for a full academic year.

The GEAR UP CRCC (College Readiness and Collaborative Communities) project, with its key component of inter-college and university partnership, serves 54 middle/high schools in the School District of Philadelphia and works to build the capacity of schools to address the needs of students for college and career readiness preparation. As the GEAR UP Coordinator, Edward acts as a lead liaison between Philadelphia higher-ed institutions and Overbrook High School. At the college and university front, he collaborates with the institutions to leverage their resources (particularly college student volunteers) in support of the GEAR UP CRCC project. On the Overbrook end, Edward works to build a strong working relationship with high school teachers, staffs, and other program partners. Through these relationships, he gets to specifically identify Overbrook’s needs; to establish an effective boundary among existing programs; and to participate in collective resource- and feedback-sharing, all of which Edward utilizes to develop and implement a volunteer tutoring program.  He hopes to build a sustainable program where there is a reciprocity of a positive and engaging learning experience for both the college student volunteers and Overbrook students.

Edward is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in Social Welfare. He has global work experiences as he engaged in preliminary research for implementing character education in K-12 at a child welfare think-tank in South Korea. In California, Edward volunteered much of his non-school related time to mentoring and advocacy, through which he championed for an education system that upholds equity, builds cultural awareness, and accommodates students’ individual uniqueness. Here at PHENND, Edward is very much aligned with the organization’s value of inter-institutional collaboration. With his field internship, he hopes to delve deeper into this concept of collaboration and wants to better understand what it is, what kind of impact it makes, is it effective, and can it be enhanced.

https://phennd.org/grant/gear-up/