"Bringing Others Up As We Climb"
OMA&D Recruitment & Outreach Lead Ambassador Experience
Summarize your proposed experiential learning activity, including the primary focus of your activity, your intended actions, and the expectations of your supervisor and/or organization/partners.
Last year, I decided to get involved with the UW Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity Student Ambassador Program. The program focuses on outreaching to students from underrepresented communities in Washington to pursue higher education. 30 Student Ambassadors are chosen every year to represent the UW by coordinating student-led tours and campus visits, admissions presentations, conferences, student panels, and showing these students that higher education is possible by setting an example. This year I will serve a leadership role as a Lead Ambassador that initiates communication for all our hard work. Merissa Tatum is the head of the program and would be the perfect supervisor to monitor my progress with this year-long commitment.
Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program Experiential Learning area you selected. Rather than reiterating our definition, outline how your activity embodies this definition.
The shared vision of the Student Ambassador program is to see more students from first-generation, low-income, minority, and underrepresented backgrounds attending UW and higher education in general. This is not a current trend in today's American society and we recognize that we CAN do our part by sharing our stories and bringing others up as we climb. As a Lead Ambassador, I will personally serve as a focal to collaborate with various schools across Washington State to make sure students are exposed to the knowledge to prepare them for higher education. I will also serve a mentorship role to my cohort of 4 ambassadors and make sure I help them with their own personal/ professional development in any role that I can.
How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?
Coming from a high school where less than 1/5 of its yearly graduates pursue higher education, my counselors took the easy way out and held job fairs rather than college fairs. While preparing students for jobs, they failed to expose the opportunity of higher education by not providing enough information about what could increase chances of admittance, documents needed to apply, and scholarships/grants available. I selected this engagement to provide these resources to students and open their eyes to opportunities never introduced to them before. I hope to gain humble skills like how to write a brief and to the point email, how to deal with different situations when students are on campus, and learn just as much from the students.
How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?
My education will not dictate what profession I obtain. The majors I pursue, courses I take, and experiences outside academia will build my skill-set so that I may apply these skills to excel in a profession that I am truly passionate about. The Ambassador program has nothing to do with either Business or Biology (my 2 majors), but that does not concern me. I recognize this opportunity builds other skills that will benefit when I pursue my goals of starting my own dental practice, local health clinic, and medicinal herb garden. Bringing others up as I climb has become part of my livelihood. I see every leadership opportunity as a stepping-stone for my personal growth and a way I can work with others to excel and reach their own aspirations.
How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your partners?
Just by participating and taking an active leadership role in the program, my goal is to help our program outreach to more students than we did last year, build a tighter-knit group through activities for the ambassadors to build strong relationships with each other, improve the communications process, and better organize/ manage consistent campus visits (so that we don't have 5 visits at the same time on one day and no visits another). In this way, we can hope to see our shared vision of having a larger presence of students from underrepresented communities and backgrounds on campus and in higher education.
Estimated hours per week: 10
Estimated project start: 09/22/2013
Estimated project end: 06/06/2014
Reflection
Looking back on the experience of being a Student Ambassador for the past two years, I am humbled by how many connections I have made with staff, peers, and students of all ages and backgrounds. While I have been trained to be well versed in the plethora of resources available at UW, having the opportunity to work with students first-hand and listen to their stories has opened my eyes to the current issues facing these students and their communities. I learned just as much from the students as I hope they learned from me and in this way it no longer became a hierarchy of just me sharing knowledge due to my position, but a pipeline of sharing knowledge amongst each other.
Although my high school counselors spent more effort in preparing military and job fairs over college fairs, I cannot blame them when less than 20 students out of every senior class ends up moving on to higher education. They were just catering to the needs of the majority and although I was not exposed to many college fairs, all it took was one person to believe in me and my potential. My parents of course, wanted to help me as much as they could, but because they grew up in Mexico and had never gone to college, it was hard for them to share resources with me because they had never gone through the process themselves.
I met Riley Haggard at an event I was volunteering at my sophomore year in high school and he immediately noticed the Sultan letterman's jacket I was proudly wearing. He asked about my future educational pursuits and what I was currently doing to prepare myself and get ready. I told him it was my desire to be the first in my family to attend a university and continue my education and sheepishly admitted I knew close to nothing on how to get there other than applying when the application cycle opened. He asked me if I knew about BioQuest at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, the Accounting Career and Awareness Program at the University of Washington, or the Law school programs for high school students at Seattle University; my answer was "no" to all of them. He said that had to change, gave me his business card and told me to email him so that I could receive the same information he sent to all his College Success Foundation students at Mariner High School in Everett.
I emailed Riley and ended up getting into every program I applied to. Because of his kindness and his belief in my potential, I sincerely believe all it took was this one person to set me up in a position where I would be a competitive applicant no matter what school I applied to because it now looked like I took the initiative to do everything I could to reach my goals. I tell students that attend our conferences, events, and campus visitations this story to let them know that I believe in them (otherwise I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing) and to network with other student ambassadors, recruiters, and myself so that we can share these resources with them as Riley did for me. I have passed out my email to hundreds of students and have received requests to look over dozens of personal statements, scholarship applications, share summer programs, and answer any questions students may have. It's been an enriching experience and I hope that I have been and will continue to be a Riley Haggard figure to many students I encounter.
Although my future pursuits in dentistry have little to do with working with students to achieve their dreams of pursing higher education, it has everything to do with helping students achieve their dreams. I see a dentist as a person who strives to see their community excel by using their position and relationships they build to understand their patients' goals and helping them reach these goals. To be a good dentist in my eyes, you have to love the community you are working for. This means understanding their needs and struggles through the stories their teeth will tell you and the stories they will share with you. As a dentist, you are constantly helping people prevent oral diseases, understand how to replace bad habits with good habits, helping your patient understand complicated procedures to make an educated decision on how to proceed, and just helping people feel more confident about their smile.
As a student ambassador, I recognize that I am extremely privileged to be in higher education - as odds say I should not be. I have used this privilege to share my story over the years to inspire minds, younger and older than mine, that higher education is a very realistic possibility for them, too. In this way, I hope to be able to use my privilege as a dentist to understand the goals of my patients and do everything I can to help them achieve their goals - to bring others in my community up as I climb.
