When Herman Buckman pursues psychology and law of society at Oberlin College this fall, he will do so without any concern about how to cover room, board, books and the other expenses that may burden some of his peers.
For Buckman, such a scenario represents not only hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, but the fulfillment of a vision that was born during his junior year, when he first got a taste of life outside of the District during a year-long study tour in Germany.
“There was definitely culture shock,” said Buckman, 18, a soon-to-be alumnus of KIPP DC— College Preparatory Academy Public Charter School in Northeast, as he spoke about his participation in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) high school program.
During the 2023-2024 school year, Buckman counted among 300 high school students and recent high school graduates who received scholarships from the U.S. State Department to study abroad in Germany. For an entire school year, he and other participants immersed themselves in the German language while attending high school, living with a host family, traveling across the country, and meeting with U.S. and German government officials.
As Buckman recounted, he gained insight about himself while interacting with peers from across the U.S. and around the world.
“Not every place has violence like the inner city,” Buckman said. “And it really just allowed me to put down my guard and be a little bit more vulnerable with myself and other people, to see parts of myself that if I was still in D.C. at that time, I probably would have missed.”
Buckman, a Southeast resident and the oldest of seven, garnered a reputation as a scholar, athlete and spoken word artist while at KIPP DC — College Preparatory Academy Public Charter School. In the realm of performing arts, his accolades include becoming a finalist for D.C. youth poet laureate and placing in the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Words on Fire festival.
As a member of his school’s track and field team, Buckman led his team to their first championship during his freshman year. The next year, he played on the 4×800 relay team that placed third in the entire city.
Before becoming a Gates Millennium scholar, and a CBYX scholar before that, Buckman similarly exhibited leadership during a summer at Princeton University, where he trained as a Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America scholar.
Buckman also received the Berea College Carter G. Woodson Scholarship, which positioned him for a full-ride scholarship to the Kentucky-based institution of higher learning.
Well before identifying Oberlin College as his school of choice, Buckman mulled over: Emory University in DeKalb County, Georgia; Denison University in Granville, Ohio; Pepperdine University in Los Angeles; and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
Oberlin College, he said, has the distance and atmosphere needed for him to become his own person.
“The more comfortable you are, the less likely you are to actually take hold of the opportunity of change,” Buckman said. “With Ohio being more midwestern, there’s going to be a lot of different people I see there — a wider range. And I can’t just run home if something goes wrong.”
Buckman called college part of a journey that will lay the foundation for a life with endless possibilities.
“I have to take it upon myself to be more autonomous, gather more individuality and from there circulate into interdependence,” Buckman added. “I really want to foster new connections and every time I put myself in those growth zones, I come out with lifelong friends.”
An Inside Look: The Family, School and Environment That Shaped Herman Buckman
On the afternoon of May 14, Buckman and other 2025 KIPP DC— College Preparatory Academy Public Charter School graduates declared their college and career plans during a decision day celebration on school grounds.
While at the college preparatory institution, Buckman took honors and advanced placement courses, along with courses in the school’s Academy of Finance. His graduation will mark the end of an academic relationship with KIPP Schools that started in the second grade, when he matriculated to KIPP DC Quest Academy in Northeast.
During the pandemic, as he neared the end of his middle-school career at KIPP DC Valor Academy within the confines of his home, Buckman watched anime, scoured through self-improvement videos, and read the words of Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
Buckman credits Aurelius for his current outlook on life.
“He really believed that life is found within relationships, within the mind, [and] the stillness of the self,” Buckman said about Aurelius.” It’s building strength within mental fortitude, emotional awareness, and…stability. It’s [about] really understanding that I’m angry right now… and then going through that process [to] come back to a neutral state of mind.”
As Buckman recounted, those words came at a time when not even his grandparents’ tough love could shield him from the perils of the inner city.
By the age of 14, while spending time with older cousins, he broke curfew from time to time and encountered tense situations as a young person navigating the District. Long before a change of scenery would break him out of his shell, Buckman perfected the art of hiding his emotions so he could make it back home safely.
“I learned how you fight, how you bluff out of this situation, right? This is when you run, this is when you know somebody’s trying to jack you,” Buckman said, calling his personal development similar to that of Malcolm X. “He was in a lot of nonsense, and in that time, that’s what constituted the Malcolm X that we know today. A lot of people disregard Detroit Red and they think that you just get to Malcolm X. That’s just not right. I had to have my Detroit Red moment.”
For more than a decade, Buckman’s family — which includes grandparents, aunts, and uncles — supported him during his daily commutes from Anacostia to Northeast, and while he juggled his obligations to school, extracurriculars and younger siblings.
In his early years, Buckman primarily lived with his grandparents before moving with his uncle as an adolescent. Both homes, he said, taught lessons that prepared him for his life as an award-winning student-athlete-artist.
“It was really a team effort,” Buckman said. “My family is extremely adamant [about] not quitting when it gets hard, but quit when it’s done. Everything I’ve ever done, it’s like, I might not want to do this anymore, but I started it, so I got to finish it.”
In his transition from Detroit Red to Malcolm X, Buckman said he also relied on Patrick Wu, KIPP DC — College Preparatory Academy Public Charter School’s director of college and career counseling, for words of encouragement, and a few books to read.
“It wasn’t the constant nitpicking,” Buckman said. “It was that constant choice. Teenagers need that choice and a mentor who’s going to push them when they do make that choice.”
However, Wu maintains that the support he’s provided over the years pales in comparison to what Buckman was able to do on his own.
“Whatever opportunities come his way, he’s willing to go for it,” Wu told The Informer. “He’s not afraid of failure because there’s been plenty of things that he hasn’t gotten, but he hasn’t been discouraged. He just keeps on going, and that’s a quality in this day and age that I find very rare.”
Wu, who’s also the school’s track coach, first crossed paths with Buckman during the summer before Buckman’s freshman year, when Buckman participated in an honors summer program during the day and cross-country track practice at night.
He said that Buckman immediately exhibited leadership qualities on and off the field.
“A lot of these students were just messing around, [but] Herman would religiously have a book with him.
He was either reading or journaling,” Wu told The Informer. “That type of work ethic is what the other students will see.”
Wu also said that Buckman’s not afraid to stand out for the right reasons.
“In his slam poetry, when you listen to it, it’s always about social justice,” Wu said. “It’s very focused on how we make the world better for others. He’s very selfless, very considerate of others, and really wants to make this school and all D.C. better. He cares so much about the school and what’s best for others. I’ve seen him pull so many young men aside, ones that I don’t even think he knows personally, and just talk to them about [how] we don’t act here.”
All in all, Buckman credits his six siblings — each of whom are either in elementary or middle school — as an impetus for walking on the straight and narrow path.
“Very early, I had metacognition…very much ingrained into me from my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, and my siblings,” Buckman said. “It was really picking and choosing when my battles had to be fought and whether that was constituting toward a war or towards my ego.”
A Sneak Peek Into Herman Buckman’s Future Plans
Since its 1999 inception, the Gates Millennium Scholarship has aimed to reduce the financial barriers to college for students of color who show high academic and leadership promise.
For years, the scholarship program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has aimed to increase representation of non-white scholars in the fields of computer science, engineering, library science, public health and mathematics.
Buck counts among 1,000 young people recently announced as Gates Millennium Scholars. The scholarship covers Buckman’s undergraduate and postgraduate studies, all the way to his doctorate.
In speaking about his future plans, Buckman mentioned law school, and the launch of schools, in D.C. and across the country, that expose young people to underrepresented white collar career fields.
“I’m not in any way going down on blue collar, right, but within our…community, we need more white collars too,” Buckman said. “We don’t have too many Black psychologists and Black lawyers that come back to the school. They don’t tell us about their processes [and] then they say it’s on the news or in an article. What student’s going to look up an article, especially when you taught them that we came here for a grade, not to better ourselves?”
Buckman identified pre-kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school as his grade levels of focus, telling The Informer that middle schoolers, especially those in the eighth grade, are lacking ample opportunity to foster their sense of self and build the confidence needed for high school.
“If a kid gets through the ninth grade year, they’ll most likely finish, right? But it really starts from that process of [figuring out] why they wouldn’t get the ninth grade,” Buckman said. “The difference between high school and middle school is very big, so pre-kindergarten to middle school would be very important and then [to] high school [for that] kind of domino effect.”