 
Spring
break for 70 UC Berkeley undergrads means recruiting college
students from Southern California
22
Mar 2000
By
Tamara Keith, Public Affairs
BERKELEY
-- While some students are heading to the Bahamas, Key West
or Las Vegas for spring break, a group of undergraduates at
the University of California, Berkeley, will spend their vacation
helping Southern California teenagers set their sights on college.
On
Friday, 70 UC Berkeley students from three campus recruitment
and retention centers will pile into about 20 cars and embark
on an ambitious trip. Their itinerary includes visiting some
100 high schools, most of them in the Los Angeles area, but
others in the Central Valley and San Diego.
These
students don't seem to mind giving up their March 27-31 spring
break to do outreach.
"It's
a lot of work, and it's a lot of sacrifice," said Guillermo
Torres, a UC Berkeley sophomore, "but it's for a really
good reason."
The
students have been preparing for this trip for months - contacting
high schools, convincing administrators to let them hold assemblies,
working with teachers. The recruitment groups - Raza Recruitment
and Retention Center, Pilipino Academic Student Services, and
REACH!, which targets South East Asians and Pacific Islanders
- chose Southern California schools with mostly minority and
low-income student populations.
The
UC Berkeley students will give presentations about the fundamentals
of college admission, including SAT scores, class requirements
and the admissions essay. The idea is to find students who may
not be considering college and give them the tools they'd need
to get accepted.
These
recruiters don't just talk about UC Berkeley. They tell students
about all their options: the other UC campuses, the California
State University system, and community colleges.
"The
main purpose is to try to motivate the students and show them
that they can do it," said Torres, coordinator for Raza
Recruitment and Retention Center. "Sometimes those kids
don't know about college. They don't know what the requirements
are. A lot of these students don't even know that they have
to take the SAT."
Many
of these UC Berkeley students will return to their high schools
on this trip. For second year student Cindy Sangalang, it will
be her first time back to Long Beach Polytechnic High School.
She said that when she was in high school she noticed some students
were taught about college while others were not. She sees this
outreach trip as an opportunity to help fix that inequity.
"I
felt so frustrated," said Sangalang, high school outreach
coordinator for Pilipino Academic Student Services. "I
wanted to do something in college that would help contribute,
to change things. I feel like this has enabled me to do that
in a way."
Frank
Lozier is UC Berkeley's community projects coordinator. A staff
member, he oversees the recruitment and retention centers on
campus and will be going on the Southern California trip. The
community work these students are doing is important, he said.
"They're
learning about issues for themselves, first hand," said
Lozier. "You can sit here and take an education class or
you can take an ethnic studies class, but when you go out and
do community work, you learn so much more. The real world is
a classroom, an important classroom."
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