During his first few years at Park View High School, many of Boris Kuperman's teachers thought he would be in jail by now. Instead, three years after his graduation, he is not only studying criminal justice at George Mason University and working as an intern to the attorney who once defended him but is also on television as a cast member in the current VH1 reality series "I Want to Work for Diddy."

On the show, 13 contestants compete to become a personal assistant to rapper, record producer, fashion designer and entrepreneur Sean "Diddy" Combs, formerly P. Diddy, formerly Puff Daddy. Kuperman said he had been told that about 1 million people either tried out at auditions across the country or sent in applications to be on the show. He did the latter and was one of the 30 candidates selected by a casting agency. Diddy himself chose the final 13 contestants.

In preparation for the show's selection process, Kuperman branded himself with the nickname "Can Do," he said, "because I have a get-it-done mentality. I can do anything and I never take no for an answer."



BY THE TIME he arrived at Park View, Kuperman already had a long history of conflicts with authority. He had been expelled from both Lake Anne Elementary School and Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. He was suspended three times within his first few months of high school and his parents sent him to Massanutten Military Academy. But he was sent home from the military boarding school and returned to Park View.

When he showed up for Mark Lynch's leadership class in 11th grade, he had just been released from the juvenile detention center again and his teachers were required to evaluate his performance each class period, Lynch said. At the second session of the year, "he showed up and he started acting like a jerk," Lynch recalled. This earned him a low evaluation, so Kuperman dropped the class for advanced P.E.

A year later, he enrolled in Lynch's business law class and his attitude was different. By then, many teachers in the school had written him off, Lynch said. However, realizing that Kuperman was "very bright and very tenacious," Lynch raised his expectations. At the end of the year, Kuperman was his business law student of the year, out of about 65 students.

"He was an incredible presence at mock trials," Lynch said. He noted that Kuperman was his only student in four years to get a not-guilty verdict out of one particularly difficult case. "He may not have been as book-smart as some of the other students, but he's one of the best on-his-feet kids I've ever had."

"I think Diddy would be highly entertained with Boris," Lynch said. "If you tell Boris to do something, he'll do whatever it takes to do it and that's what Diddy's looking for."



NORA MAY failed Kuperman in 10th-grade English "because he was either cutting up or not doing the work," she said, so he was in her class again the next year. He worked harder that year, and, perhaps because he was taking two English classes at once, it was the first time he passed the Standards of Learning (SOL) test, May said. "I think that was the first time he felt that there was a light at the end of the tunnel."

She said Kuperman always came to class but had a hard time focusing, sitting still and not trying to take control of the class. "He could pull a student or teacher off topic very easily," she said, adding that he often did it in a way that was amusing. "It's almost like a gift he has. He kind of has the gift of gab."

Kuperman said Lynch and May were two teachers who had pushed and encouraged him to turn himself around. In the last quarter of his senior year, he got straight As.



HE HAS NOW worked as an intern at Pam Cave's law office for more than three years. Because it is her own small practice, she warned Kuperman that she could not pay him, so he first worked for free and now works for college credit. "When I met him, he had been in a lot of trouble," Cave said. "Nothing violent, the kind of doofy trouble kids get in when they lack direction."

She said Kuperman had shown himself to be "loyal to a fault" and that his performance with her office had exceeded anything she had expected. "Without him, I wouldn't have been able to keep my practice going since my daughter's car crash," she said. When her daughter was paralyzed in an accident in June of 2006, Kuperman drove back and forth each day between her office in Fairfax and the hospital in Winchester, bringing letters and faxes, and he appeared before judges to apprise them of the situation. He filled much the same role again later when Cave had a premature baby.

Cave said she felt Kuperman would lay down his life for her and her family. "You can't be grateful enough for somebody like that."



ADDITIONALLY, SHE said, he is driven and hard working, absorbs everything he sees in court and handles people well. For example, she said Kuperman had recently gone to a military base and got right up to the commander to get attention paid to the matter of a member of the military not paying child support, after all of her letters and faxes had been ignored. "There's something about the way he handles interaction," she said. "It often doesn't matter that I'm the one with the credentials."

Cave said she thought Kuperman would make an excellent assistant to anyone. "Some of the things he's able to accomplish, you can't pay money for," she said, although she added that she thought he had too much talent and potential to be an assistant to an entertainer.

During his last stay in the detention center, Kuperman said, he had given his life to Christ, as he put it, when visited by a member of Reston's Oakbrook Church. He said he had settled on law as an aspiration because it was familiar after he'd had so many brushes with it.



AFTER THE THIRD episode of "I Want to Work for Diddy" had aired Monday, Aug. 19, Kuperman said the arriving contestants had been divided into two competing teams, the Uptown and Downtown teams, and had challenges sprung on them by Diddy and his people. The challenges were tasks such as convincing a model to come along for a Diddy photo shoot, coming up with a tagline for his new line of sunglasses or multitasking, an exercise in which the teams were given 50 tasks, such as securing a clown for one of Diddy's children's birthday parties, washing his car or buying watches, within 24 hours. Each episode, a contestant is eliminated.

Kuperman said he had started out keeping quieter than usual while "trying to come up with a master plan," but had eventually become a better team player.

He came up against his biggest test when his team lost the third challenge and one of them had to be eliminated. "Everybody on the team chose me to go home because they said I was lazy and they said I didn't do much on the challenge," he said. He responded by pointing out that another of his group members continued to say the group's project was flawless and that the judges were wrong, showing that he hadn't learned from his group's defeat, while Kuperman had. He also said this group member had hidden the fact that he had marketing and advertising experience, which could have been valuable to the team.

His teammate was voted off the program.



THE SHOW did afford Kuperman a chance to meet Diddy, although not for the first time. He had met him and a number of other celebrities during the two years or so that he worked at magazines like Streetz and Xclusive. "He's crazy. He's intense," Kuperman said. But, he said, "At the end of the day, he has a business mind."

He said he was a fan of Diddy primarily as an entrepreneur, and he viewed a chance to work for him as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could open doors. Already, Kuperman has come out with his own line of Can Do merchandise, including shirts, sweatshirts, baseball hats, bibs and infant bodysuits.

It took about a month to film the show, he said. Ten episodes have been recorded, four of which have now aired, but Kuperman said there could be an additional twist at the end.