Matthew Brown, a first-year UVM student from Richmond Vt., has been singled out by the College Board as one of the nation’s five most outstanding students for his high scores on the SAT’s and his impressive high school career. Brown was flown to Washington D.C. Aug. 30 to attend The College Board’s annual College-Bound Seniors press conference, at which the institution responsible for such programs as the SAT, the PSAT/NMSQT®, and the Advanced Placement Program®(AP), discussed SAT score trends for the previous year’s high school graduating class.

Brown graduated from the Vermont Commons School, a small private school in South Burlington, Vt., where he pursued an academic curriculum and received the school’s first Naturalist Certification.

Passionate about the environment, Brown plans to major in biology. Over the past two summers he has worked as a counselor at a local camp, teaching kids about organic farming and caring for animals, as well as leading hiking and canoeing trips.

During his last year of high school, Matt worked with his biology teacher, Peter Goff, to design and teach a course for seventh through twelfth graders that revolved around Living Machines, a type of natural water purification system invented by John Todd, research professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

“What really convinced me to attend UVM,” Brown says, “was being invited to join the Honor’s College,” a program, now in its second year, that provides an intensely focused, academically challenging environment for some of the university's most outstanding undergraduate students.

The College Board announced at the press conference that math scores on the SAT have continued on their recent upward trend, rising from 518 in 2004 to 520 this year, while verbal skills have increased only fractionally, remaining at 508.

Joining Matt at the press conference were four other students, diverse in ethnicity and gender, including Eugene Byuen, a senior at Governor Livingston High School in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey; Deborah Francois, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School in Brooklyn, New York; Alejandro Gac-Artegas, a first-year student at Harvard University; and Addison Kemp, first-year student at Mount Holyoke College.