Mentoring gives high school students a hand

By Jaclyn Youngblood     10/29/09 7:00pm

Outside of passing AP Chemistry and finding a date to prom, applying to college can be one of the most daunting tasks of a high school student's career. To address this issue, The Mentorship Project, a club formed recently at Rice, held a college workshop in Dell Butcher Hall last Wednesday and Thursday for 125 Houston-area high school juniors and seniors seeking assistance with the college application process, Chair Christina Rojas said. Rojas, a Brown College sophomore, said the workshops were done in collaboration with Project GRAD, a Houston non-profit organization that aims to increase high school graduation and college attendance rates, according to its Web site, www.projectgradhouston.org.

Essay Chair Gabe Cuadra said many of the students come from low-income backgrounds and will be the first in their families to go to college.

"These are really smart kids; they just don't have someone telling them, 'Hey, by the way, you should probably take the SAT,'" Cuadra, a Will Rice College junior, said.

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Rojas said the day included a walk-through of the Common Application, a presentation of SAT information and examples of well-written college application essays.

Wednesday's workshop featured two sections - a session on the college application process and a session on college application essay writing - while Thursday's workshop included a financial aid presentation and a tour of Rice.

Students were shown how to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid form and then given a tour of campus, including a quick look at West Servery and McMurtry College, Rojas said.

Project GRAD helped TMP pick the five high schools from which workshop attendees were selected: Yates, Wheatley, Davis, Reagan and Sam Houston.

Rojas said feedback from the students who attended last year was positive, especially concerning the campus tour.

"One of the best parts about the workshops is bringing them to Rice because they get to actually see a college campus," Rojas said. "A lot of them have never seen [a] college."

While the workshops are in their third year, this is the first year TMP has hosted them. In the past, the education committee of the Rice Student Volunteer Program held them, Rojas said.

"A lot of people were frustrated because they interacted with the kids at the workshops and then never got to see [them] again or see if they got into college," she said.

Last spring, five students from Rice Student Volunteer Program created TMP to take the burden off RSVP.

"[The workshops were] kind of swamping the education committee," Rojas said.

In addition to hosting the workshops, Rojas said TMP also plans to start a year-round mentorship program. She said she hopes to have club members visit at least one of the five high schools one or two times a week to see how the students' applications are progressing and to continue to provide assistance and resources.

"Our goal is to see at least 30 kids get into and go to college," Rojas said.

She said last week several TMP members visited a few of the schools to meet and bring lunch to the students before the workshops. She said many of the students want to apply to college but aren't sure how.

"They all have the ambition - they just don't have the right resources," Rojas said. "They all have so much passion and want to go to college, but they get stuck [filling out a form] and they give up."

The workshops began with encouragement from Associate Director for Education Carolyn Nichol, who works with Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology and receives grant money each year from the center, Rojas said. The sophomore also added that part of the grant money must be put toward education, and the workshops are the project Nichol has selected to fund.

Rojas said now that TMP is its own club, they want to provide workshops in the spring for high school freshmen and sophomores. She said the workshops will encourage students to prepare for the college application process early in their high school careers.

"[We want to] build them up so that when they do apply to college, they'll be more successful," Rojas said.

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