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AmeriCorps Community Fellow, Upward Bound
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Drumming Program at a Saturday Program
I have now served as the Graduate Intern and AmeriCorps Community Fellow for Upward Bound for almost a full academic year, and I have to say that this opportunity has been the best integration of my personal, educational, and professional goals. Upward Bound is a department housed within Penn State’s Office of Educational Equity that serves low-income, potentially first-generation college students in grades 9-12 from the neighboring four counties. Currently, Upward Bound serves about 100 students throughout the academic and summer months engaging them in various componets of our program which I describe below. As a result of a personal interest and in-class assignments, I was pointed in the direction of the Office of Educational Equity to seek out potential internships and was lucky enough to find this program. I began my time with Upward Bound in March of 2010 as I was developing my Research Proposal for my Research and Assessment course on “Low-Income High School Students and the College-Choice Process.” Upward Bound’s structure and programmatic goals aligned so closely with my personal and professional goals that I was able to include various pieces of Upward Bound’s initiatives into my Final Proposal for my Research and Assessment class which can be found in the "Spring 2010" link under "Graduate Curriculum."
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UB Students doing Service at Shaver's Creek
There are two main components to Upward Bound: an academic-year piece that includes monthly meetings with school counselors, participation in three Saturday Programs at Penn State per semester, individual consultations with Upward Bound Counselors twice a semester and there is a summer piece which is a six-week residential component required for all emerging Seniors that includes courses, programs, educational and cultural excursions, and more. I have various responsibilities in our office, but mostly serve as the Coordinator for Saturday Programs. As a staff we collectively develop basic goals we’d like to see come to fruition for each of our Saturday Programs, I then consolidate those ideas, supplement what is lacking, develop mailings for our students using Publisher, and create our logistical material such as our morning presentations and our daily agendas for our students to keep throughout the day. Another beneficial aspect to my learning has been my task of developing the assessments for each program. In addition to its development, I am also charged with recording and evaluating the responses we receive. From the information gained as a result of the assessments, I then develop suggestions for our next program and present these during our staff meetings. For February’s Saturday Program I also had the opportunity to create and present my own program that I titled “Choosing the Right College for You” to about 60 high school students. This program received resounding positive feedback and as a result my staff has requested that I continue to present for the next two Saturday Programs.
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College Student Majors Panel
During my time with Upward Bound I have also had the opportunity to gain knowledge around writing for Federal Grants and developing an understanding of our federal funding requirements. A lot goes into these pieces of our program, but the time is necessary because almost all of the funding originates from the grant. I have also had the chance to participate in the student selection process for new students and gain an understanding of the professional development requirements asked of our professional staff. Upward Bound has provided me with a frame of reference a bit different than I have been able to receive in my courses or other experiential learning because it directly focuses on access to education as opposed to already being a student. I have valued my learning in this position very much and am looking forward to being able to connect the experiences I have gained with this population of students to future groups with which I may be working.