Path to College
Overview
A key goal of the Bootcamp is to give high school students and exposure to college learning and opportunities. We want all students to believe that college is a realistic and achievable goal.
The Bootcamp will help you find your answers to these questions.
- What is college really like?
- How much does it cost?
- How to pay?
- Where to go?
- Meeting and working with mentors
- Visioning for the future
The path to college can be viewed from different perspectives
- Geographically: Where is college relative to my home?
- Chronologically: What are the steps I will take to get enrolled in my first class?
- Environmentally: How does my community support my effort to get to college?
Reverse Timeline Exercise
One way to view the path to college is chronologically, as represented by the following image, which suggests a series of stages that progress in time.
One of the exercises in the camp is to image this path in reverse, starting with your first day in your first college class, and then think back to the present day. We ask camp participants to imagine the subject/topic of the class, the size and style of the classroom, and how they feel (excited, curious, worried, afraid). We then ask them to work backward in time to imagine what they could do to have a positive first day experience. Conversations with the mentors are a natural outcome of this exercise.
You can download the worksheet we give to camp participants that contains a series of questions for several stages along the reverse timeline.