“If you have never set foot on a college campus, now you have done it,” booms Kristina Reardon to some 40 boisterous middle schoolers. “By the time you leave today, you can say, ‘I went to college!’”
It’s 3:30 p.m. on April 26, in Lewis-Sebring Commons at Valentine Dining Hall, and the junior-high vibe is mighty. A roar goes up, for instance, when Reardon announces that Val offers soft-serve ice cream. There are fidgets, murmurs, hot takes about the swag bags (“Do I get to keep this journal?” shout several kids). One youth wears a Goosebumps book series T-shirt, and another, on hearing about clubs on campus, asks if there is a Fortnite club. “No, but you could start one!” says an Amherst student, gamely.
And so begins this year's College Access Day at Amherst. Kristen Luschen, the Lewis-Sebring Visiting Professor of Education Studies, and Reardon, director of the Intensive Writing Program and lecturer in English, have helped organize the event, along with the 32 students from two of the College’s education studies classes: “Writing the College Experience,” with Reardon, and “Race, Education and Belonging,” with Luschen.
And this college group, in turn, partnered with 10 students from Amherst-Pelham Regional High School, who attended these college classes and acted as consultants for College Access Day. In other words: 40 adults and teens have joined forces to host and educate these 40 middle schoolers, who have ties to the Amherst-Pelham Regional Public Schools Family Center.
The event has been funded by Amherst College’s English and American studies departments, Education Studies Program, Center for Community Engagement and Provost’s Office.
Today’s goal is to start demystifying the idea of college—for local youths who’d likely be the first students in their family to go to college. At Lewis-Sebring, Luschen and Reardon kickstart a sort of College 101: they sketch out what a major is, what daily life is like as a college student and how college can lead to all kinds of careers.
Then, for the next few hours (before inhaling that soft-serve at dinner at Val), the youths will split into two groups. The yellow group breaks off into smaller pairings, taking a campus tour, while the red group gets distributed between several classrooms at Webster Hall for a writing workshop centered on envisioning college. Then they’ll switch. Later, back at Val, Amherst students will field questions from the crowd.
I tag along with Zachary Watson ’24 and Frida Hernandez ’24. They shepherd two basketball-crazy boys who, after being disappointed that Amherst cannot be found in their March Madness brackets, rally at the vision of dinosaur skeletons at the Beneski Museum of Natural History and the newly acquired knowledge that, at a residential college like this, you live in dorms and can watch March Madness games in the common rooms.
When Watson asks what they like best at school, and they say gym class, he discusses careers in kinesiology. When another asks if it’s scary to start at college, Hernandez nods yes. “But everyone else is scared, too,” she says. “And then you make new friends.”
Later, Luschen tells me she’s pleased at how College Access Day unfolded. She says, “The event encouraged Amherst College students to reflect deeply on how colleges and universities can support access to college for students in our local communities, and the ways in which youth can have a meaningful voice in college access efforts.”
That day, the middle schoolers are full of comments and revelations. One tells me he never knew that “college” comes in many flavors, such as community college, universities and residential colleges. Another is surprised by how many books are in the library. One says they loved the study spaces at the Science Center. And many are struck by the lush green views at every turn.
Oh, and one student observes that one of best things about college, unlike his life now, is that you don’t have to ride a bus every day to get there.
The next College Access Day will take place in the spring of 2024.