Welcoming all walks of life

     GCSU welcomed 22 minority students to campus on Nov. 9 through 10 for Glimpse Diversity Weekend. According to the GCSU website, the weekend is an opportunity for students of color to learn first-hand about the GCSU experience.
     Glimpse Diversity Weekend, formerly known as Cultural Diversity Weekend, began in 2003 by Joffery Blair, associate director of admissions and Paul Jones, vice president for Institutional Research and Enrollment Management.
     For the past two years, the program has been planned by Brandon Jackson, assistant director of admissions. This year, he had the help of the Diversiteam, a minority recruitment team that started this semester.
     Melisa Coker, a junior psychology major and member of Diversiteam said the first time she visited GCSU was during a Glimpse Weekend event.
     “That was the first time I visited the school, and I fell in love with the hospitality and the small town feel,” Coker said.
She said the event was a great time for prospective students to see the campus.
     “I think Glimpse is a great opportunity for high school kids to check out our school,” Coker said.
     As a part of Diversiteam, Coker assisted in advertising the GCSU v. Glimpse Weekend Challenge, and she hung out with the students the entire weekend.
     This is the second year that Glimpse included a challenge between the GCSU students and the high school students. Jackson had the idea of a challenge last year. He said he wanted to do something one might see on television.
     “One of the key things of the challenge is that it has to be shocking,” Jackson said. “It has to be something that they normally would not do in order to make it memorable.”
     There were four parts to the challenge, and the winners in the groups of four won $100.
     Jackson said that the Glimpse program always yields high acceptance and enrollment rates. Last year, close to 80 percent of the prospective students enrolled. However, he said it is difficult to say whether these students would not have enrolled had they not had the program.
     “I will say that the program allows students who normally would never come to campus to come down and actually spend time,” Jackson said.
     Jackson said programs like this are important for GCSU since it is an up-and-coming, fast-growing institution.
     “One of the things we pay close attention to, and it’s also in our mission statement, is the diversity of our student body,” Jackson said. “And that’s something that we have struggled with for the past couple of years.”
     He said to in order to become more diverse, we have to bring minority students on campus so they can see what it is like being a student here.
     Camille Fonseca, a sophomore early childhood education major, participated as well, though she is not a member of Diversiteam.
     She said she talked to a lot of the prospective students, and they really seemed interested in attending college here. She said they were asking a lot about diversity here.
     “I told them even though there (weren’t) a lot of black students, you get to meet a new black person everyday,” Foncesa said. “You might be the only one in your class, but it just makes you stand out, it makes you special.”
     Coker also thinks Glimpse is important in that it shows students what GCSU is really like.
     “We need to show prospective students not just what they see in brochures, but what the school is actually about,” she said. “It is good for us to try to build personal relationships with these students, because it helps with the transition from high school to college.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 16 2007. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry