Every Wednesday a group of 15 students head on over to Whetstone Elementary School in Gaithersburg to tutor third through fifth grade students through the Pillar Project.

According to the club’s president, senior Gustavo Pacheco, the Pillar Project is a student run, non-profit organization that provides free tutoring and mentorship to elementary school students in disadvantaged areas of the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. The club has two overall goals: to encourage students to achieve academic excellence  in addition to familiarizing them to a basic level of how the brain works to allow them to become more understanding of mental health disorders.

“Through this program, I hope to facilitate a better understanding of mental disorders so the next generation within the communities will be more understanding of mental health problems,” said Pacheco.

This year, the club has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Johns Hopkins University. Alternating with helping students with their homework, Pacheco said he also pulls lessons from a provided Hopkins textbook, rewords them to be taught on an elementary school level, and then utilizes different online interfaces and applications developed by MIT to teach the students.

Upon  joining the club in his freshman year, Pacheco realized the difficulty of controlling a group of young children, but has since learned to always keep the children engaged and interested.

“The best thing is having a student be proud of what they’ve accomplished,” said Pacheco. “It makes me very happy when a student comes up running with a paper in their hand saying, ‘Gustavo, look…I’ve got an A on my paper!’”