UCLA Campus Visit
Introduction
One of my primary goals as an educator is to set my students up to be the most successful members of society they can be after they leave my classroom. One way to do this is to ensure they are on a path to successfully enroll in an establishment of higher learning that most aligns with their personal life goals and ambitions. Furthermore, college and career readiness is one of the cornerstones of the mission and vision shared by all faculty members at Manual Arts High School. However, I realized that many of my students were unaware of their options for continuing their education after graduation and the steps required to attain their personal collegiate goals. Post-Secondary education is a necessary step for many of my students to achieve their desired life goals. However, due to funding issues and staff turn over at Manual Arts causing our college center to close, my students, and many of their families had not been exposed to the people, programs, resources, and connections required to open this crucially important door for them to make an informed decision about attending college. The following access opportunity was designed to close this gap by presenting students with an outside opportunity to engage with people, programs, and resources that could allow them to establish connections they could leverage as a crucial tool as they navigate the decision-making process for what to do after graduation.
Identifying the Need
During my second year working at Manual Arts, we had a high amount of staff turn over, and due to funding issues, many of the positions were left vacant. One of these positions was the director of our college center. Many of our college readiness, exam preparation, and campus visit programs ceased to exist as a result of this loss of this faculty member. During my first year, the college center was an excellent resource for students and their families. The staff member who ran the college center exposed students to the people, programs, resources, and connection necessary to make an informed decision about what to do after graduation from Manual Arts. However, when the college center closed these resources were no longer readily available to my the majority of my students because they did not have the tools necessary to navigate and access the same opportunities on their own. Teaching an advisory class of eleventh graders—who were all getting ready to take the SAT and begin looking into their options for college—made this issue especially apparent and worrisome. As a result, I met with some of the other eleventh-grade advisory teachers to create a plan to ensure our students had access to various people, programs, and resources necessary to make an informed decision about their futures after their graduation from Manual Arts.
After meeting, we decided that organizing a campus tour would be the most beneficial way to provide access to our students in this regard. The next step was determining which of Los Angeles' many universities would be the most helpful for our students to visit. We considered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); University of Southern California (USC); California State University, Los Angeles; California State University, Northridge; Loyola Marymount University. At first, we heavily considered USC because it is directly across the street from our school and thus transport would be easy to arrange, and minimum funding for the field trip would be required. However, after much discussion, we determined that this would not be beneficial for many of our students because many have already been exposed to the university through connections established with the USC Upward Bound program at our school as well as various community events put on by the university. Students and their families were already able to navigate and access the people, programs, and resources at USC, so this would not have fully opened additional doors for students. We eliminated this University from our list of potential locations due to this realization.
As a teacher in the School of Medical Science, Arts, and Technology, the vast majority of my students were interested in majoring in STEM in college with the eventual goal of starting a career in STEM. For this reason, UCLA was selected for a campus tour because of its strong science department, which had the potential to expose students to people, programs, and resources that could be leveraged in their futures. While this may seem like a regionally obvious opportunity—because UCLA is located in the city in which my students live—it is not typically accessible to many of my students. Manual Arts is located in a low-income community, and many of my students do not have the funds to leave South Central and travel around the city. I was shocked when I first began working at Manual Arts, and several of my students told me they had never seen the ocean—which is only nine miles from their homes. While South Central and Westwood seem close on a map, the time and money required to get from one place to the next acts as a barrier for access for many of my students. UCLA is an incredible school—located practically in my students’ backyard—that is the perfect location for this access opportunity.
CSULA logo
UCLA logo
LMU logo
USC logo
CSU Northridge logo
"What I Want for My Future" Activity
After determining a UCLA campus visit and tour would expose our students to the maximum number of people, programs, resources and connects out of our potential options, and give them the tools necessary to navigate these opportunities, each member of the eleventh grade advisory team independently decided how we wanted to present this opportunity in our class and what activities we would implement to prepare our students. I took some time to think about my students and the activities I thought would be beneficial to best prepare students to navigate and access this opportunity. I realized this particular group of students could benefit from a mindset framing activity to get them thinking about what they want to accomplish in their lives after they graduate from Manual Arts. Many of my students were so wrapped up in their present circumstances that they had never taken the time to think about what significant milestones they wanted to accomplish in their lives. To provide this opportunity, students completed a “What I Want for My Future” intention setting activity.
We began this activity with a class discussion about major milestones that students aimed to achieve at some point in their lives. Students were then given the handout shown here and instructed to attempt to rank their desired milestones from most to least important. Following this ranking process, students were required to think and then write about how they would be successful in achieving their goals. Nearly every student had "graduate from college" in the top three spots of their priority lists—setting us up perfectly for the second phase of our tour preparation.
"What I Want for My Future" student work samples
Ideal College Profile
During the "What I Want for My Future" activity, the majority of students identified that they need to successfully graduate from college to achieve most of their life goals. However, most of my students had only been exposed to people and programs at the University of Southern California, Santa Monica Community College and Los Angeles Trade-Tech College. They were almost entirely unaware of the vast amount of diversity between their options for a university. I began this lesson by showing several pictures of Indiana University—where I obtained my undergraduate education. This school, with a large campus in a Mid-West college town, was unlike anything my students had ever seen in person. One student said they thought universities like Bloomington only existed in movies. We then proceeded by looking up pictures of different types of college campuses—such as urban, suburban, rural, religions, state-funded, etc. Several examples of the images shown in class are displayed below.
A picture of Indiana University Bloomington I took on my graduation day
The iconic Sample Gates at Indiana University Bloomington
The center of Indiana Bloomington during autumn, a season many of my students have never personally experiened
Loyola Marymount University—where I attended to receive my teaching credential
The University of Notre Dame—where the majority of my family members earned their various degrees from
New York University—an example of a university in an urban setting
After a class discussion about different types of colleges, students were given the “Ideal College Profile,” shown in the document on the left, to begin thinking about what type of college they would ideally like to attend. The profile is a general checklist to get students thinking about what they actually would want from their ideal college experience. At the end of this activity, students were instructed to synthesize their choices from the survey to describe their “ideal college.” This profile was completed electronically, and students were instructed to save the files in the LAUSD Google drive account so they would have access to it when they were ready to start applying to universities the following year.
We concluded this lesson with a discussion about UCLA and expectations for the field trip. Finally, students were instructed to prepare three questions each that they could ask various people they would meet on the campus tour. Some of the questions that students came up with were as follows: "is it possible to take classes full time and work part-time to help pay for school;" "if I went to UCLA, would I have to live on campus or could I still live at home and help my family;" "how exactly does the ‘pre-med' major work at UCLA;" "what is the average day of a UCLA student like;" and "are there internship opportunities during the summer break."
Ideal College Profile student work samples
Pictures from the Campus Visit
On the day of the field trip, students were able to walk around campus; visit an actual classroom, science lab, dorm room, and the library; eat a meal in a dining hall; participate in several hands-on activities to show various career options; and meet several professors, a member of the admissions team, a member of the financial aid department as well as a several members of the freshman orientation team. Throughout the day, students had the opportunity to see what their lives could be like as a student at UCLA and get any UCLA specific or general questions about college answered. The photographs below show students at several of these experiences.
Students with the UCLA bruin mascot statue
Students on a tour of campus
Learning about the application process
Q&A with a chemistry professor
On our way to eat that the dining hall
Members of the freshman orientation team
Student Survey and Reflection
Based on experiences I had taking my students on other field trips, I learned that the longer students wait to reflect about a trip the worse the quality of those reflections become. Also, after our time at UCLA concluded, students took a bus ride back to South Central and Manual Arts, and with Los Angeles traffic this ride could be anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. Instead of allowing this to be possible instructional time wasted—I asked my students to complete a reflection survey about their day. Students had the option to fill out a paper copy of the reflection or to complete a Survey Monkey on their phone—they all selected the electronic survey. Student responses to the Survey Monkey are displayed in the document to the left.
Student survey responses
Teacher Reflection
This field trip—and the in-class preparation—was one of my favorite experiences I have had during my career as an educator. Students were exposed to a group of people, programs, resources and connections that they could navigate and access to open doors for themselves after their graduation from Manual Arts. At the start of the first lesson, students were only vaguely engaged and could hardly articulate what they wanted from their lives post-graduation from Manual Arts. By the end of our day at UCLA, students were asking insightful questions about the university and about how they could achieve their desired life milestones. It was amazing to see this transformation happen in such a short period. This field trip also opened doors by establishing a continuing dialog between my students and helped build a support system of connections for them to lean on during the stressful college application process. Even though I now no longer work at Manual Arts—and I don’t even live on the same continent as these students—they all still frequently email me questions and updates about their application process. I don’t think they would have reached out as much without the activities described above. I have been able to continue to support them, answer general questions, write letters of recommendation, and cheer them on from afar because of the bond created through this outside access opportunity of a campus visit and preparation process. I can firmly say that this opportunity opened doors for students to access various people, programs, and connections that had the potential to be closed to them due to the closing of our college center. Finally, students were able to navigate these resources to assist them in the crucial decision-making process about what to do after graduation.