Program Gives Scholars An Edge on Admissions

Joy Massey has two full ride scholarships to UC Berkeley, where she will start as a freshman in the fall and where she hopes to study psychology before going to medical school.

Massey’s parents never graduated from college, so when it came to studying for the SAT, picking classes to take at Berkeley High School, where she is set to graduate this month, and filling out college applications, she relied heavily on her coordinator at the Y Scholars Program.

She said that thanks to the help she received through the program, she is looking forward to achieving her goals in spite of the challenges she’s faced in her life.

“It means so much for my family and me and that I accomplished what I did this year,” Massey said. “It gives me hope that even though I come from my background, I can have this opportunity.”

It is teenagers like Massey that the Y Scholars Program, run through the Downtown Berkeley YMCA, aims to help as they attempt to make sense of the college search and application processes.

The program was started in 2000 and is unique to Berkeley, where it operates out of the YMCA and recruits students from Berkeley High.

“We used to work out of a janitorial closet. After a year, when the school realized we were going to stick around, we were granted more space to run our programs,” said Rebecca Milliken, director of Youth and Teen Programs at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA.

Funded through the YMCA and private donors, Y Scholars continues to grow as much as its resources will allow, with somewhere from 30 to 40 teens on the waitlist each year for the approximately 160-student program.

Teens who are accepted go through three years of group meetings before being paired with a coordinator who works as a case manager with them through their last year of high school.

Some students are also paired with mentors, often UC Berkeley student volunteers, who help them with homework and picking classes, among other tasks.

Coordinators aim to keep the program small enough to give students the individual attention that program Co-Director Sayuri Buritica said they might not otherwise get at a big school like Berkeley High or from parents who do not know how to navigate the college application process.

“We’re kind of the parent role in the situation, kind of always getting on their case about deadlines,” Buritica said.

While there are no GPA requirements for admittance, students cannot have parents who graduated from a four-year college and income is a consideration, said Jennifer Ma, co-director of the program.

Once accepted, students benefit from guidance in picking classes, help studying for Advanced Placement tests and SAT exams, organized Bay Area college visits and guidance in crafting personal statements for applications and navigating financial aid forms.

The program was built to help students overcome barriers that program directors said range from language struggles to a general lack of familiarity with the college application process that are often issues in homes where parents did not graduate from college.

“Lack of encouragement I would say (is a barrier) just because the majority of a our families are low-income, they’re encouraged to work instead of study more for the SAT’s, for example,” Buritica said.

Providing that extra encouragement is what is so rewarding about the program for Berkeley resident Leah Shelleda, who has worked as a mentor for two years.

“Essentially I’m an older friend who she can rely on and is there to help her achieve her goals,” she said, explaining the role she plays as a mentor.

After applying to 15 colleges, program participant Amritpal Singh, who will be attending his first-choice school, UC Davis, in the fall, said he didn’t know if he could have done it without his coordinator.

“When it came to applying to college they really helped a lot. My coordinator came in on weekends to help with my personal statements and things like that,” he said.

With approximately one-third of program graduates going on to UC schools, a third to CSU campuses and the remaining third to private schools or community colleges, Buritica said program leaders are left with a rewarding feeling as they say goodbye to their students every May.

“The time when all of the students get their acceptance letters,” she said, pausing. “When they get in they’re so happy and the first person they tell is their coordinator or the staff.”

Tags: