BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published November 20, 2008

Beginning this spring, Swarthmore will offer college counseling services to low-income and first generation applicants in the form of student telementors. This new program, launched by the admissions office, will pair up trained telementors with second-semester high school juniors. The mentor will guide his or her assigned students through the entire college process, from producing a timeline for creating and submitting admissions material to talking about the distinction between public and private institutions.

Assistant Admissions Dean Nick Peterson is guiding the program through its initial stages. While the application process for aspiring telementors is still in progress, Peterson is developing a clear sense of what the program is all about. “It’s about giving students accurate information from kind of the other side of the process,” he said. Telementors will be able to serve as a source of such information both because of the experience they’ve already had with the process and because they will go through a training session. “Essentially, what we want to do with our telementors is really train them to understand the college application process,” Peterson said. Through training, they will learn how to help high school students navigate application deadlines, understand the differences between types of schools and schedule visit dates.

Calvin Ho ’11, a multicultural recruitment intern in the admissions office, was excited when he first heard about the new program. “Personally I feel that expanding educational opportunities for underprivileged students is important,” Ho said.

Peterson was quick to establish that the program is not about recruiting students to attend Swarthmore. “The goal of this program is not actually to recruit students to Swarthmore but to provide auxiliary, additional, supplemental college advising help to students who typically come from communities that may be underserved,” Peterson said.

Implicit in this goal is the idea that college counselors provide services that can’t be provided by The Fiske Guide, the College Board Web site or college visits alone.

Peterson said that college counselors often help with tasks that seem minor, such as packaging application materials and suggesting highly selective but lesser-known institutions — tasks that can be difficult for students to grapple with independently.

Cecilia Marquez ’11, a multicultural recruitment intern in the admissions office, said that she found her college counselor to be instrumental when she was applying. “[The importance of college counselors] is one of those things that goes unrecognized,” Marquez said. According to Peterson, many students at Swarthmore also expressed deep satisfaction with high school guidance counseling.

But in addition to providing purely factual information, Peterson hopes that the telementors will be able to provide emotional support. “We want students to be that voice of empathy to let them know that you can actually get through this. I know your parents may not understand it. I know these schools are very far from home. But you can actually do it,” Peterson said.

In particular, the telementor program is trying to encourage Swatties who didn’t have guidance counselors or who are first-generation college students to share their experiences with and mentor underprivileged high school students. “I’m working on trying to recruit students of color and low-income students [for telementoring]. Since the outreach has begun we’ve received an influx of applications. We’ve seen a wide range of people across class years. That’s really exciting,” Marquez said.

Peterson is working on the other end of things. Along with the other deans, he is trying to identify high schools that would benefit from the program. He described one charter school in Oakland, California that is graduating its first class next year. The current juniors at the school have no senior class to look up to for advice about the process. Peterson has invited these students to apply to have a telementor. Only those students at high schools that the admissions office has invited can apply.

Peterson foresees that once the application process is over, they will launch a small program in the spring with five to ten telementors, each with at most four mentees. “We’re definitely not trying to get in over our head [sic] in terms of the amount of resources that we have to do it with,” Peterson said. As for the future, he said, “We’re really in uncharted territory.”

For interested students, the telementor application can be found online at www.swarthmore.edu/x20208.xml.

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »