On Friday February 22, 2013 46 female eighth-grade students interested in math and science from Joseph Emerson Brown and John F. Kennedy middle schools, from West End and Vine City respectively in the Westside, visited Georgia Tech to get a taste of college life. The event took place as a partnership between Westside Communities Alliance, a joint venture with Georgia Tech’s IAC and College of Architecture led by Dr. Sheri Davis-Faulkner and Mackenzie Madden in the Office of the Dean, and InGirls, an organization focused on increasing college acceptance among underserved female students.
Undergraduate students Danielle Sharpe and Cecili Reid and PhD candidate Nettrice Gaskins welcomed them to campus in the morning. We sent them off in small groups for various activities. Some attended classes in the School of Economics and School of Literature, Media, and Culture. Others attended robotics, public participation, and augmented reality demonstrations in the GVU (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability) Center, while others visited the EarSketch recording studio in the School of Music. We had lunch in the Presidential Suite of the Bill Moore Student Success Center overlooking the football stadium while Chris Briggs, from the Office of Admissions discussed why Georgia Tech is such a wonderful school and how to prepare for admittance.
Student volunteers from IAC Ambassadors, IAC Student Advisory Board, Delta Sigma Theta, FirstGen, JumpStart, OMED, and the courses NearPeer and Science, Technology & Race then took them on informal tours of campus and provided the girls an opportunity to ask questions in a smaller setting. Some highlights of their tours were Tech Rec and the Campus Recreation Center. Several of the volunteers also gave the girls their contact information to continue serving as a college liaison. The girls left excited about the prospect of attending Georgia Tech, something that may have seemed unattainable before this visit, short term goal of the program. We look forward to an ongoing relationship with the InGirls program to ultimately increase acceptance and admittance from our neighboring communities.
