| New director has big plans at Hopkins Center for Talented Youth |
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The Baltimore Sun December 27, 2011
Elaine Tuttle Hansen will never forget stepping into her first college class after years of feeling out of place as a smart kid in her small Massachusetts hometown.
"It was like, 'Oh my God, there are people out there like me,'" she says.
It's a sentiment often expressed by students who arrive at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, where Hansen recently took over as executive director. After years of feeling misunderstood or unchallenged at their regular schools, these precocious elementary and middle schoolers say they finally feel "at home."
Hansen, who came to Hopkins after nine years as president at Bates College in Maine, has, in effect, decided to work with children who remind her of herself.
She's worried about them.
Though the center — used by more than 25,000 students a year — is well known in Baltimore and in education circles around the country, it's easily pigeon-holed as "nerd camp," a place where oddballs go to solve chemistry problems in the summer.
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