At 9 a.m. on April 12, a group of about 30 local high school
seniors and some of their hosts — UCSD students who housed the potential
freshmen in their dorm rooms the night before — stood in a circle in Mandeville
Center’s East room.
senior Kevin Mann and
circle in a meditative activity.
“Close your eyes,” Mann said. “Think about the feeling of
entering a different stage in life and becoming whoever you want to become.”
After a few last words, the UCSD High School Overnight
Program was over, and the high school seniors were ushered off to enjoy the
rest of Admit Day. The hosts’ duties, which included accompanying their
students all day Friday and opening up their dorm rooms at night, were
complete.
UCSD’s HSO program is a one-day, one-night event that pairs
a UCSD admit with a current student to give the potential freshmen a tangible
idea of what life at UCSD is like.
“It was [many students’] first time at UCSD, and some had
never even been to a college campus before,” Mann said. “[Visiting] sometimes
can seem really impersonal and we really wanted to give the students a really
personal experience in a one-to-one mentorship fashion.”
As student co-coordinators for HSO, Mann and Chea have both
been part of other student initiatives that have held various overnight
programs over the past few years. But this year the program has been given
higher priority in an effort to increase the diversity and yield of accepted
applicants who actually end up attending UCSD.
Admissions officer Jaime Velasco said that this year’s HSO
program collaborated with Student-Initiated Access Programs and Services and
the Admissions Office, after Chancellor Marye Anne Fox released a report in
2007 highlighting UCSD as one of the least diverse campuses of the UC system.
The March 2007 report, released by the Advisory Committee on Increasing Yield
of Underrepresented Students, said that of the nine UC campuses, UCSD ranked
ninth for percentage of black students and eighth for percentage of Latino
students, and has less than 1 percent American Indian students.
The HSO program targets underserved high schools,
specifically from the bottom 20 percent, that are lacking college resources,
Advanced Placement classes and “a-g” college preparatory classes in addition to
having low college attendance rates.
Velasco hopes to see the program grow and reach the level of
quality it had in the late 1990s, before the 2002-03 budget cuts crippled its
scope. This year, the program encompassed only
and
while, in the past, the program was able to reach
Angeles
“This year was kind of a ‘Let’s get started again,’” Velasco
said. “My hope is that it is expanded throughout the state. It would be nice to
get literally 300 or 400 students at an overnight here.”
However, in terms of increasing yield, expanding the program
is only part of the process. The student coordinators attribute this to the
lack of knowledge that students from underserved high schools have about campus
resources.
“We have heard comments from high school students that the
reason they don’t choose UCSD is because they don’t see themselves here,” Mann
said in a statement. “They don’t see their peers here. They don’t see people
from their own communities here. They don’t see the support networks that they
can have when they come to UCSD.”
To combat this, hosts are encouraged to introduce their
students to the various resources on campus, bring them to classes, eat at
dining halls together and immerse them in dorm life. All of these experiences
combined, plus a host’s hospitality, are what coordinators hope will push
potential freshmen to feel more connected to UCSD’s community.
However, HSO is not just for students who are undecided in
their college choices.
Mario Zuniga, a senior at
Vista
is already set on going to UCSD. Although it was not his first time visiting
the campus, Zuniga feels this particular experience has both heightened his
sense of what to expect out of college when it begins for him this year, and
given him a lot to look forward to.
“This was my first time ever going to an actual class,”
Zuniga said. “We got to see the whole campus; we saw everything.”
The program is also a positive experience for UCSD students
volunteering as hosts.
Zuniga’s host, chose to get involved because he had previously participated in
the program.
“I did the same exact program when I was a junior in high
school and I had so much fun, and I would definitely say it affected my
decision to go here,” Acueza said.
Although many of the students became involved in the program
because they wanted to give back to their community, Roosevelt College freshman
and HSO co-chair Olushade Unger chose to be a host because she never saw her
own high school involved in an overnight program.
“It shows that people care,” Unger said.
Acueza admitted that one of the biggest hurdles is the
student perception that UCSD lacks a social atmosphere.
“It can be really fun,” Acueza said. “I don’t want to say
it’s not true, about UCSD having no social life, but I feel like you can
totally change that; it’s what you make of UCSD.”
According to the evaluations that HSO representatives
collected at the program’s end, many prospective students expected even less of
the college experience than the common stereotypes, which Mann believes could
easily be due to their insufficient exposure to any college campus.
“[Students] thought it would be boring and all about school,
and what they came away with was that they didn’t think college could be so
fun, didn’t realize there could be more than academics,” Mann said.
Despite the possible misconceptions and current lack of
diversity, UCSD students involved in HSO feel they are taking a step forward in
helping their community and affecting actual change.
“It’s an uplifting feeling to say we’ve made an impact in
other students’ lives,” Chea said. “We want to make sure that each community is
welcome here, and can pursue an education here.”
