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Like most youngsters, Pierce Minor was an inquisitive child. But for Minor the question wasn’t why the sky is blue. His question was: How do you get to college? “I was one of the most college-bound third graders you’ve ever met,” says the 18-year-old who entered Cal this fall as an Alumni Association Achievement Award scholar. “I was asking what’s college for, how many years do I have to go to be a doctor, what’s a grant, what’s a loan? There weren’t many people in my family who had been to college, only distant relatives; and, whenever they came around, they were like superstars to me.” Minor is one of 23 members of the second group of students to attend Berkeley under the Achievement Award program. These awards seek to level the playing field for students who qualify academically for admission to Berkeley, but who can’t afford college. They may also have come from backgrounds where there were few role models to encourage them to prepare for college, in spite of their outstanding achievements in high school.  Begun in January 1999, the Achievement Award program was conceived as an antidote to the declining enrollment of under-represented student populations following the passage of Proposition 209. In addition to a seed grant of $500,000 from the chancellor’s discretionary fund, 183 individuals have given $457,449 through the Alumni Association. Students receive up to $5,700 in financial aid each year. Once on campus, they are part of a support system that includes networking with alumni, mentoring, and social events. The first class, the “Founding 15,” as they proudly call themselves, had an average GPA last year of 3.3. Forty percent of the parents of this year’s scholars didn’t graduate from high school, so while they may encourage their children to pursue college, they have little experience with the college admissions process. That’s why one of the requirements of the Achievement Award is that a student must have participated in one or more UC-affiliated outreach and college preparation programs such as Upward Bound, MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement), EAOP (Early Academic Outreach Program), or the Puente Project. Operating something like training camps for college, these programs begin working with students as early as elementary school. They provide tutoring, particularly in math and science; admissions test preparation; group study programs; and even tours of college campuses around California. The Puente Project also provides accelerated writing instruction as well as mentoring by professionals in the community.  Minor became involved with Upward Bound when he started the tenth grade at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. He quickly realized he needed more college preparation than he would be offered at school. “My school really didn’t teach me anything about going to college,” he says. “The focus was to graduate and get out. They didn’t want to see us any more.” Minor worked at a McDonald’s during high school while earning a 3.5-plus grade average, was president of his senior class and president of the committee that ran Crenshaw’s Martin Luther King Jr. museum. But he still found time to participate in Upward Bound. “If it hadn’t been for Upward Bound,” Minor says, “I wouldn’t have taken that first college trip in my sophomore year that introduced me to Cal. I was infatuated with the school because I had been on the campus, but we hardly ever got people from Berkeley to come and speak to us at Crenshaw. Most of the students at my school lack the information they need to get into these places. They say, ‘Oh, I can’t do it.’ They don’t know what goes into being admitted or getting financial aid. They think college is out of their reach.”  College preparatory programs that say “Yes, you can” are particularly important to students who have faced adversity in ways unfamiliar to most college students. At 14, beginning Achievement Award scholar Gabriel Lugo saw a friend shot in East Oakland. At 14, Minor’s family situation in St. Louis became so stressful that the formerly straight-A student almost failed the ninth grade before moving to Los Angeles to live with his father. Second-year scholar Phuong Nguyen worked 35 hours a week during high school to support her brothers and sisters and still kept her grades up. At an early age, Jamika Lopez was told, “You need to realize you are a minority woman and you will not make it.” Today Lopez is a second-year Award recipient and president of the Achievement Council, the student-led governing body of the Achievement Award program. Chancellor Robert Berdahl welcomed the students to campus at an Alumni House reception on August 31 and encouraged them to share their dreams with the students coming up behind them. “You need to make certain you tell your brothers and sisters about your experiences,” Berdahl said. “We want you to give back as well.” If their high school resumes are any indication, giving back is second nature to these new students. Andrea Valverde, an anthropology major, worked as a translator and interpreter for immigrant workers. Jazlyn Bradley, an aspiring lawyer, tutored at her former elementary school. Laimeng Lee was a student ambassador to Japan. Monica Gomez-Melano, a molecular and cell biology major, worked as an Amigos volunteer in the Dominican Republic. Christina Garza-Feramisco worked the “homework hotline” in grammar school and volunteered at Planned Parenthood while in high school. Garza-Feramisco, 19, is a biochemistry major who plans to go on to medical school and a career in public health. She attended a retreat this summer to brainstorm fall outreach strategies for targeted East Bay schools. Primarily, Garza-Feramisco says, the students want to prolong the connections they make with middle and high school students, perhaps sponsoring a “Buddy Day” when high school students can spend a day on campus with an Achievement Award student.  “We want to target students who have little motivation to go to college, and ask them why they think they can’t go to school. We anticipate they will say ‘money,’ ‘I have a kid,’ ‘I’m not smart enough,’ or ‘I don’t know what I want to do.’ We want to tell them there are ways of overcoming those barriers. It’s very difficult, I won’t deny it,” says Garza-Feramisco, who graduated from high school at 15 and had a child at 16. “I had to go looking for child care and people willing to help and support my going to school. But I would tell a student that having a child is all the more reason to want to go to school, to better yourself.“ Cal competes fiercely for talented and ambitious students like those enrolled in the Achievement Award program “The quality of life at Berkeley is enormously enhanced by having a student body that comes from all parts of the community,” Berdahl said at the reception. “We know you had many other choices. We want to make sure this University does right by you.” Lauren Peebles, an 18-year-old freshman from Oakland, wanted to go to college in the Bay Area, but the only big school recruiting her, and offering her a scholarship, was UCLA. “They were calling me all the time,” she says. But then Berkeley offered Peebles the Achievement Award, and made it possible for her to afford to go to Berkeley. She’s never been happier. “It was primarily the financial aspect that made being able to go to college possible,” she says, “but being in college is turning out to be so much more than that. It’s like every day I’m learning something new—I even tried sushi for the first time,” she says with an infectious giggle. “Every day I’m so glad I’m here.” |
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