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By Jingxi Zhai
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Oct. 16, 2009 |
The district encouraged seniors from the city’s high schools to attend a college fair on Sept. 25.
Seniors Amanda Wong and George Lee visit a booth at the "School is my Hustle" college expo on Sept. 25. (Sharon Yee)
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The school district teamed up with SF Promise, a non-profit organization that encourages public school children as early as sixth grade to envision a college diploma in their future. Their goal was to encourage more San Francisco seniors to attend college.
Three hundred and twenty-five seniors attended the event from Lowell. “A lot of seniors went from Lowell,” assistant principal Janet Tse said. “We were provided seven 54 capacity buses and six were completely full.” Chaperones for the expo were assistant principals Michael Yi, Tse, a security guard and five counselors.
Although attendees gave mixed reviews about the exposition, the reviews were mosly positive. Senior Jonathan Lee particularly enjoyed his time at the event. “I was able to get a lot of my questions answered that my counselors could not,” Lee said. “Most people just went around the booths once then left. I waited until everyone left and then I got a lot of one-on-one time with more than 10 colleges.”
College representatives were also pleased with the enthusiasm of the attendees. “When we had a chance to ask the reps what they thought, most of them were impressed with the questions the seniors asked, ” program coordinator of SF Promise Martin De Mucha Flores said. “A lot of the seniors were serious about this fair.”
Although many district seniors benefited from the fair, some seniors had already garnered college information elsewhere. “As a whole district, I think the fair was beneficial for the seniors,” Tse said. “Lowell students actively seek college events on their own and thus they moved through the college tables quickly.”
Students were told that 100 colleges would be participating in the event but about 65 showed up, according to Flores. The relatively small amount of colleges that attended may be linked to the recent economic crisis. “Normally when you have a college fair, you have a lot of colleges from the East Bay and Midwest coming here to meet our kids,” Flores said. “Because of the economy, a lot of colleges are cutting back on travel and cannot outreach as much as before.”
Students and administrators commented on the smaller-than-expected number of college representatives at the fair. “I imagined it to be bigger,” Tse said. “I thought there might have been speakers regarding financial aid and scholarships in addition to other tables of information.”
Some students were initially disappointed by the small number of colleges that participated, but were still able to enjoy their time spent. “The event was over-hyped and it was mainly just local colleges,” senior Amanda Wong said. “But I was still able to learn a lot about different colleges, the admission process and financial aid.”
Flores helped organize the Sept. 25 “School is My Hustle” College Expo at Civic Center. “The idea took ground when we at SF Promise looked at the San Francisco Unified School District calendar and noticed that there weren’t any college fairs in the fall that directly served SFUSD students,” Flores said. “There are a lot of college fairs that happen at private schools and public schools are not really showing up to those.”
The title “School is My Hustle” was spurred by Flores’s graduate school faculty advisor, Watson. “Watson first coined the term ‘school is my hustle’ when she was a high school senior, who chose to apply for scholarships to go to college instead of just dropping out of school,” Flores said. Flores was inspired to name the college exposition for his mentor.
The expo was held as an optional field trip for all San Francisco public schools and some charter schools. “We really wanted to organize a college fair during school hours, early in the school year when seniors have just started thinking about college and kind of getting ready to ask those last questions, especially about new admissions policies,” Flores said. “All public schools invited attended with more than 3,200 seniors participating.”
This was the first joint college fair hosted by SF Promise and SFUSD and will not be the last. SF Promise aims to double the number of San Francisco public high school graduates who receive post-secondary education and at the same time, increase the number of college graduates from underrepresented groups. “As long as I am program coordinator, I will hope to organize more expos similar to this one,” Flores said. “We will be pushing for another one next fall as well.”
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