Often, he and Charles would visit the rooms of gunshot patients. Charles hoped to enroll them in an intervention program - maybe to get a GED or a job.
"When people leave the hospital," Steven later told his classmates during his senior-project presentation, "they go right back to the streets that sent them there. We have to do what we can to keep them from coming back."
Steven, said Charles, carried himself "like he belonged there. He's able to go into that room and look that kid in the eye and say, 'Hey, man, what's going on? Talk to me,' as someone they can relate to.
"But until he walks with the college diploma," Charles added, "it's all about hope. It's all about potential, but we have to get him there."
Charles quickly recruited his wife, who happens to run a Penn program to help prepare African and African American freshmen for university life.
"Black students have a hard time at Penn," says Camille Charles, a sociology professor and associate director of the Center for Africana Studies. "No matter how academically or socially prepared they are."
She offers myriad reasons for the disparity, including their heavy dependence on financial aid and the social pressure of being black on an overwhelmingly white campus. On one hand, there's fear of being perceived as not black enough, she said. On the other is the burden of stereotypes.
"They know that their whole race is being judged on the basis of their own individual performance," she says, "and it has a negative impact on their grades."
As for Steven, she checks off added concerns: his worry for his grandmother, his need to work, Penn's tough academics and sheer size.
To help, she contacted his adviser, and connected Steven to a few science professors. And she plans to help him find a job on campus, closer to his studies.
"He's a resourceful kid," she says, "but at the end of the day you don't want the initial shock to be so great it gets him off balance and he has a hard time coming back."
For Steven, hard times have been his strength.
"I'm nervous, I'm excited - I'm everything," he says about college. "Becoming a surgeon is an extremely long road. But it just strengthens my resolve to succeed."
Whatever happens, his grandmother says she'll be there for him.
"I tell him you have to know where you stand with yourself, and I think he's come to that point."
Contact staff writer Kia Gregory at 215-854-2601 or kgregory@phillynews.com.
