Brain Power Coming To Hamilton This Summer

Over a few years, Ernst Ma went from a high achieving yet overly talkative high schooler to a budding entrepreneur, pitching ideas on reducing plastic waste to a Fortune 500 company.

Along with his education at Upper Canada College (UCC), Ma enrolled at Brain Power, an after-school enrichment program designed by PhD holders.

In January, Brain Power expanded from its home base in Vaughan, Ont. to a second, new location in Hamilton at McMaster Innovation Park. Later this year, the program moves to a larger Hamilton Mountain location for summer programming at Hillfield Strathallan College.

Today, as a Brain Power admission ambassador and a business student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ma truly appreciates the “academic acceleration” he received as a Brain Power student.

“We’re very fortunate to live in a country that has phenomenal public schooling, but even when it’s done to perfection, it still lacks additional value,” said Ma.

The key, said Ma, is transforming great students into exceptional ones by pushing them to expand their limits.

“A lot of what Brain Power does is open those doors. It’s opening those doors to opportunity you would have not otherwise known and coaching you at a very personalized level to achieve success in those programs.”

“I was never a shy kid,” Ma noted. “I’m pretty talkative ... The interesting part is how do you take someone with that kind of personality and kind of refine it to something really impressive?”