ASP Program -- My Job (Part 1)

First of all, I am back, after... a somewhat long hiatus!

Well since the last entry, and consequently the "temporary shutdown" of this blog, many many things have happened. So, let's start with my wonderful (honestly) job as a residential counselor (RC) at Columbia University for the ASP Summer Bridge program. Well, first of all, I;m going to explain what the program was all about. The students of the program were chosen for usually one or both of the following reasons: That they came from schools that did not offer many higher level classes such as Calculus, Chemistry, Physics or intensive writing classes. Or that they area minority and come from a lower income family thus qualifying them for HEOP or NOP. It's mostly the latter but for some, these people are just well off but have never taken higher level class. The whole point of the program was to try to give them a head start or in some case help them to be on the level as other incoming freshman. So they have to take 4 classes, different depending on is they are in the engineering or liberal arts school, they get homework, have midterms, have to take finals, and have mandatory tutoring sessions. As a side note, th students will not be receiving credit for the classes they are taking during this 5 week period, and th grades they receive technically do not matter. So when the students found that out, some instantly started to become indifferent with the program, which is understandable. The program also tries to introduce the kids to the various resources of Columbia by giving, a ridiculous amount of workshops, which in my opinion, most of the students will really not remember until the time comes for them or actually utilize these offices and stuff. But I guess the staff thinks otherwise. But it came to a point when many of the students barely had time to do anything they wanted because all of these mandatory events. But i suppose all these events help out when the office creates the proposal that is sent to the government to ask for the funding for the program. In my opinion though, the program does somewhat help them academically, but doesn't really give them a taste of Columbia and what they will be doing freshman, because honestly you are alone and YOU get to dictate what you want to do and when YOU feel like doing it. Over here, me and the other RC's would get on the students to do stuff on time and what not but during the year, you won't have anyone to tell you that you should doing work. Lastly, before I get to describing what I did during the past few weeks, let's describing the whole "boundaries" issue that the program enforces. Well, the students are not supposed to go past 110th Street and 120th Street between Riverside Drive and Morningside Drive (plus or minus like 5 streets around), just for the reason that around half of the people in the program were not from New York and could easily get lost or something could happen to them (or some of the New Yorkers who haven't been around NYC much as well) and technically speaking the program is responsible for these students and stuff.. and no one wants a law suit on their hands. And if the students would want anywhere significantly away from campus, then an RC would have to be with them. Honestly, it's not really as if anyone was posted on the corners of the streets to watch, we pretty much just had to hope they didn't go beyond these "boundaries."