Summit at CSUSM Elevates Voices of Young Students

Summit at CSUSM Elevates Voices of Young Students

By Brian Hiro

High school students participate in a team-building event during the REP4 summit at CSUSM on July 11. Photo by Erica Perez

As a student affairs professional, Erik Ramirez has attended many meetings in which the primary topic is concerns about enrollment in higher education.

What if the best way to address such worries isn't to brainstorm solutions among administrators in a conference room, but rather to go out and ask the targets of any enrollment push: high school students?

That's the concept behind a national organization called REP4(of which Cal State San Marcos is a founding partner), and it was main thrust of a REP4 regional summit hosted by CSUSM on June 11-12.

"I don't think it happens often that young people are asked to share their ideas or to tell us what it is that we're doing wrong or what it is that we could be doing better to serve them," said Ramirez, director of initiatives and partnerships for CSUSM's Division of Student Affairs, and the organizer of the summit.

REP stands for "Rapid Education Prototyping," and it aims to engage young students to solve problems in higher education. Earlier this month, for the first time, CSUSM held a two-day summit that brought together 37 high school students along with eight CSUSM student mentors, three CSUSM professors and some staff members.

The high school students were 10^th through 12^th graders from Los Angeles County who have migrant and seasonal farmworker backgrounds. They were already on campus as participants in the second annual Migrant Scholars Summer Institute, a 10-day program through which students live at CSUSM and get a head start on experiencing what college is like.

The summit took place in the Innovation Hub and the University Library Reading Room. The students were split into seven groups, and each group started with a team-building activity that involved building a tower out of raw spaghetti.

With a CSUSM undergraduate mentor embedded in each team, the students then were introduced to the notion of design thinking by the trio of CSUSM faculty: sociology professor Matthew Atherton, social work professor Jimmy Young and Sajith Jayasinghe, chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department.

The faculty teach different disciplines in different colleges, but all are experts in design thinking, a framework for grappling with real-world problems by trying to empathize with the community that the problem affects. It's an iterative process with multiple stages: understanding the problem, devising various possible solutions, creating a prototype of the solution you decide on, then testing and evaluating it.

Once they had settled into their teams, the high school students were presented with a prompt: How do we make college more attractive, inclusive and accessible? Guided by the professors and using the principles of design thinking, the teams went through a series of activities to determine how to tackle the prompt. Some focused on the difficulty of picking a college, others on the financial aspect or a sense of belonging.

"Then based on what particular issue they wanted to address or they identified, they proposed a solution," Ramirez said.

The proposals were made in the manner of a business-style quick-pitch competition - think the TV show "Shark Tank" - and, in the end, two top pitches were selected. The first was for a peer mentor program called Adopt a Buddy that would pair new students with upperclassmen who would serve as their mentor during their first year at a university. Participation would be incentivized by things like academic credit for the mentors and free swag for the mentees.

The second pitch was for a phone app titled Uni-verse through which college students would create youth-oriented content to help high school students learn about universities in California and ameliorate the issue that many feel of overwhelming choices. The app could be scaled to include virtual reality tours of individual campuses.

"The most rewarding part was seeing their confidence build throughout the process," Atherton said. "As the students were able to start creating and refining their innovations, you could see them getting excited about their proposals. Seeing the students gain confidence each time they presented their idea to a new audience during the final event shows the power of active, experiential learning opportunities."

Each member of the winning teams received a $200 credit for the CSUSM bookstore. More significantly, from a university perspective, the two winning pitches will be submitted this fall to the REP4 national conference, where the best two pitches from all the regional summits across the country will be chosen to receive funding as a prototype.

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