It’s 10 a.m. on March 19 and just as Healy Tower begins its hourly chimes, yellow buses full of sixth-graders pull up to Georgetown’s main gates right on time.
Spilling out of the buses, the students walk through the gates, some staring up at Healy Hall, others pointing to the storey-high inflatable Jack the Bulldog balloon that greets them. But there is no time to dawdle -- today is jam-packed with scavenger hunts, meetings with professors, tours of the residence halls and more.
The 180 students from Washington’s Sousa and Ronald H. Brown middle schools have come to Georgetown for Shadow Day. As the culmination of the six-week
Kids2College program, Shadow Day gives sixth-graders in D.C.’s Ward 7 schools a taste of college life and what it takes to make it into a university.
“Our goal is early college awareness,” says
Charlene Brown-McKenzie, executive director of Georgetown’s
Meyers Institute for College Preparation. “We’re giving them the sense of a campus and community, so six years from now they’ll have a better idea what college is about as they start to apply.”
Georgetown undergraduates in the Patrick Healy Fellowship program and other student volunteers have spent the past six weeks in Sousa and Ronald H. Brown middle schools providing snapshots of college and career preparation.
For some of the sixth-graders, Shadow Day marks their first visit to Georgetown – or any college or university. Others have been to the Hilltop for summer camps or academic events. But no matter what their familiarity, Shadow Day organizers want all the students to leave with thoughts of college in their futures.
Patrick Healy Fellow
Carlos Palacios (SFS’09) led the student organizers for Kids2College this year. Previously involved with D.C. Reads and D.C. Schools tutoring programs, he says working on Shadow Day was the next natural step for him.
“We can talk about college to the kids as much as we want, but they’re in sixth grade. Until they see and visit here, it won’t be real to them,” Palacios says. “They need to experience the campus and be able to touch it to know that it is really possible for them to be here or at another university some day.”
Undeterred by the light rain coming down, students break off into nine groups. One troops off to a talk by English professor
Dennis Williams, who also is director of the
Center for Multicultural Equity Access and associate dean of students.
“What kinds of things can you study in college?” Williams asks a small group of students, who call out science, law and engineering.
“And what is engineering?” Williams prompts.
When the sixth-graders don’t volunteer an answer, the professor launches into an explanation of different engineering fields, segueing into a discussion on the academic skills needed to succeed in engineering or medicine. Math, he reminds them, is important for many career paths. Williams recommends that the students keep their academic curriculum wide-ranging in middle and high school.
“Take everything you can now because you might not know what you want to do when you go to college,” he says. “There are a lot of different things you can be, and if you don’t know what you want to do yet, you’ll want to have options.”
Some of the middle school students are already thinking about their college plans.
Rashid Gholson, 11, isn’t sure where he wants to go or what he wants to study yet – just that he definitely plans to go to college and play hockey there.
Of course, university life is not only about hitting the books, so the sixth-graders get a taste of life outside of the classroom as well. A scavenger hunt takes them around the Hilltop; tours of residence halls shows them how college students live. The sixth-graders also dine in O’Donovan Hall with Georgetown students and professors.
“By visiting here, I want my students to get an experience they wouldn’t normally get,” says Sousa teacher
Charles Pace. “This isn’t a superficial experience – they are eating the food, talking with professors and seeing the dorms.”
Sousa teachers, he says, have piggybacked off visits by Georgetown students to his classes by talking more about college life.
“We don’t hesitate to tell them it’s the best time of your life,” Pace says. “Today helps them understand what it takes to get there.”
The Kids2College program, funded this year by the United Planning Organization, operates as a feeder program into the university’s Meyers Institute for College Preparation. The institute provides children from some of D.C.’s underserved neighborhoods academic enrichment that prepares them for college. Students enter the institute in seventh grade and receive academic support through their first year of college.
The Meyers Institute is just one component of Georgetown’s Ward 7 Initiative, which works with students, families and schools in the eastern-most part of Washington. The ward has D.C.’s largest number of children living within its boundaries, and has lower student test scores than the rest of Washington.
“Reaching outside of the university boundaries and into the community is important for Georgetown because there is such great need,” says
Linda Greenan, associate vice president for external relations. “There is huge need in Ward 7, particularly, and the overall initiative allows us to extend our outreach and coordinate efforts so we are reaching more children.”
