Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Reducing the achievement gap
133 Plays2 years ago
This episode is all about First Gen Support organization - dedicated to spreading college awareness & providing resources for first-generation, low-income, and immigrant students. With us in the studio is Julia Sun, the founder of First Gen Support. We learn about the achievement gap and what causes it. Moreover, we are diving deeper into the college Prep-A-Thon that will take place on August 2022. Do not miss the latest advices for starting and running an organisation. Sign Up for College Prep-A-Thon
Follow ChangemakerZ https://go.changemakerz.org/follow
First Gen Support social media handles at https://lnkfi.re/firstgensupport
Access exclusive content on the ChangemakerZ app at https://app.changemakerz.org
Produced by Vasilis Skarleas
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Changemakers and Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello everyone, I'm Saloni. And I'm Vassilis. We run Changemakers, a student-run initiative that aims to empower, educate, and connect gen players interested in entrepreneurship. We interview teenagers with impactful projects and create resources to help you change the world. If they can't do it, so can you.
00:00:23
Speaker
On this podcast, we discuss logistics of creating different types of projects with Gen Zers who have already done it. We will leave our social media and website information in the description. Hello, everyone. Vasilis here. Welcome to another episode of The Tender's Rise.
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm so excited to date for two reasons. First of all, with me the studio is Saloni after a very long time. Secondly, we have a new microphone in the studio which is great.
Julia's Motivation and First-Gen Support
00:01:02
Speaker
Today's episode is all about first-gen support org. Dedicated to spreading college awareness and providing resources for first-generation, low-income and immigrant students.
00:01:13
Speaker
Our guest is Julia, who will present what the first dance support is all about. Nice to meet you, Julia. Hi, nice to meet you. So, every time that we start a podcast, we usually ask what made you to create first dance support.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. He gave a little background. So I found a Persian support in 2020. So I was really inspired by the BLM movement. And from talking to friends from some of the programs, peers across the country, and also people in my high school, that we all came to the conclusion that it's very much up to chance for people to find opportunities, especially for Persian-Loan and American high schools.
00:01:58
Speaker
And I also was talking to my friend from high school who went to an Ivy League institution but didn't do a lot of extracurriculars or advanced classes. She felt that she had a lot of regrets. So I founded this to further eliminate regrets in like future generations of students because a lot of under-resourced students start their college applications
00:02:24
Speaker
the summer before their senior year, which is way too late. So we seek to empower students early on, focusing on freshmen and sophomores in high school so that they can believe in themselves and prepare college early on. And yeah, so founded it as like a social media page to just release opportunities and now it has grown to a nonprofit organization.
Challenges for First-Gen Students
00:02:51
Speaker
So what is the achievement gap and what sort of causes it?
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So the achievement gap, in our case, is the disparity in going into a four-year college. The gap is between people who are not first and low income versus the people who are. And first-generation students, so the first person in their family to go to college, they are 70% less likely to attend a four-year college. And we all know that right now,
00:03:21
Speaker
Oh, jobs need a bachelor degree or more. So in order to overcome the socioeconomic barrier and getting into another, like, getting out of that low-income bracket, we believe that students need to go to a four-year college. So then we prepare them to go do a four-year college through reusing opportunities.
00:03:51
Speaker
And what causes this achievement gap is by the lack of opportunity, the lack of also college-going environment in high schools, because you've seen successful, a lot of people who go to four-year colleges, they're surrounded by a competitive environment, which a lot of under-resourced high schools don't have, because they're not super focused on going to a four-year college.
00:04:19
Speaker
So that environment and the people you surround with in high school is super crucial. And also the lack of mentorship from schools, from counselors, because a lot of low-income high schools, the counselor to students ratio is very small. So not usually not enough counselors in those high schools.
00:04:43
Speaker
And also just the lack of resources because a lot of people who go to a four-year college or prestigious schools have the money to hire tutoring and SAT prep, but there is not a lot of resources for students.
First-Gen Support's Initiatives and Events
00:05:02
Speaker
And so, yeah, it's also highly dependent on chance because obviously their parents haven't gone to college, so they can't really pass on their experience.
00:05:13
Speaker
Still a myriad list of reasons, but pretty much, yeah.
00:05:20
Speaker
You mentioned like you talked about lack of mentorship, lack of experience and as you said maybe some parents they have the the experience to be on the college and maybe it's difficult to pass this through their kids and understand why it's important or not important according to what they want during their lives. I would love to touch on the fact that there's lack of experience in work. Like after you take your degree
00:05:48
Speaker
Sometimes it's so difficult to take experience to what you have studied so that you are not able to be hired from a company to do what actually you studied. And in the end, you are I've to work a
00:06:02
Speaker
work on your field. Maybe you will discover that you like this field even more from what you expected. But do you think that this can lead to, I don't know, maybe this can create a problem to how we gain experience for people to be hired on the jobs that they really prepared for? I think that's a good question. I think that's not up to me to dictate how companies work, first of all. But I think
00:06:33
Speaker
You know, a lot of first-gen low-income students go straight into the workforce right after high school. And I think, yeah, so right now, obviously companies are looking for people who have a college degree. And I think college offers a lot of
00:06:52
Speaker
like more like well-roundedness if that makes sense.
Building a Sustainable Team
00:06:57
Speaker
Like you get exposed to a lot of different areas to decide what you want to do. But I think I'm not against people who are like going straight to the workforce after high school. I think it's just for first and low-income students to
00:07:14
Speaker
They just have a much higher chance of increasing, moving up in class mobility with a college degree. We talked about the achievement gap, but can you mention what initiatives and events do you guys have to tackle this gap?
00:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, so we started as a social media page, but we seek to build a community and host events. That's one of the initiatives we use to host study groups to build that community. The study groups are a lot about us doing SAT prep and stuff like that. And also, I think one of the key initiatives is Share Your Story initiative. So we highlight first of all,
00:08:06
Speaker
students who have succeeded and highlight their story of how they overcame challenges and barriers so that we can empower the future generations. And also we are hosting a college proper fund this summer.
00:08:21
Speaker
Last year we hosted a college fair with 50 plus colleges, and this year we're going to continue that event, that really large scale event, but kind of like a hackathon style event for college applications. So that's one initiative that we have this year.
00:08:45
Speaker
That's really interesting. So how do you kind of go about organizing this college public bond? And how do you
Content Creation Process
00:08:52
Speaker
market it to people? Yeah, so organizing, actually, it takes a lot, definitely. Also, I received a grant from Cornell to run this to cover some of the marketing, like email campaigns to spread the word.
00:09:12
Speaker
And also, I think incentive is like prizes. So I think marketing, like, like different like prizes that people can get on stickers for this event.
00:09:27
Speaker
Also, another thing about organizing is that we need to find the right people to delegate the tasks to. So currently I am recruiting right now for directors, for my team, and also for this event. So definitely taking a lot of volunteers, a lot of work, a lot of contacting speakers and mentors, also sponsors as well.
00:09:53
Speaker
So yeah, it's a lot of organizing things to do. And this can be available, like, is it going to be available online or to be attending person to person? How have you organized that?
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, so College Purplethorn will be from August 2nd to August 6th. And it will be for rising sophomores to rising seniors. It will be a virtual event where anyone can join from across the nation. You'll be on Zoom. A lot of Zoom speakers on Zoom, mentors on Zoom. Yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
This is great. I love the online and virtual events. Have great experience on that. Would you like to share about your team? How did you build your team? And what do you think that a good team player looks like?
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, so building a team is definitely the hardest part building like a sustainable team. Currently, we just released the application on our Instagram and people apply, generally, that's how it works. But I think the fundamental part of building a team is to, you know, find the core people that you want to be in leadership positions that are
00:11:18
Speaker
very dedicated, very committed, and very skilled as well. So that creates a very sustainable team and that's very, very hard to find because
00:11:31
Speaker
because people have other
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
00:11:33
Speaker
priorities or people have internships and jobs. So I guess another thing to building my team is that after people apply, we interview people and finding the people who are truly passionate about the mission, not just someone who wants to add another thing on their resume.
00:11:57
Speaker
understand the mission as well as a great communicator. I think that's a key part of building a team. Yeah, I definitely agree. A team is definitely one of the most important aspects of creating a successful organization.
00:12:19
Speaker
How do you manage all your team members to use any platforms like Slack or any messaging apps or any kind of like, I don't know, like file organization system to keep everything clean?
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, for sure, for sure. So we started with Facebook Messenger, actually, and that was a disaster. So we use Slack right now. Yeah, it was in the beginning, it was a mess, but we used it for like half a year. And then we transferred it to Slack. I think Slack is definitely
00:12:55
Speaker
a very, very good tool. And then we use Google Drive to organize documents and folders. I know a lot of teams use Notion. We use TaskScade to assign tasks and also Google Calendar to schedule meetings. Slack is very popular. This is why it's designed for teams working and collaborating together. And you are right about Notion. It's really popular. I like your new perspective to try new
00:13:25
Speaker
like communication and filing systems and so forth. We love your website and Instagram posts. What is your design process? Do you have a person dedicated to create the Instagram content? Or do you collaborate with other people outside the organization?
00:13:45
Speaker
For sure, so in the beginning it was me who was creating the instrument books, but since then I have a team, my wonderful director of content creation, Aliana, she's currently in charge of her team making, her content creation team making the posts.
00:14:08
Speaker
So yeah, so we use Canva. I think the lot is very popular to make Instagram posts. So we have people delegated to do the Instagram posts. Awesome. Yeah, I think we talked a lot about different aspects of running an organization and to kind of tie it all together. Do you have any tips or advice for anyone looking to start an organization?
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think one advice I have is the founder should have a long-term vision of what they want to create. I see so many high school organizations, people do it for college apps and it dies when they get into college.
00:14:55
Speaker
So I think if you really want to, if you truly are passionate about the mission and truly see and want to create value for people, definitely have a long-term vision, long-term plan of starting a team. But also I think what I learned throughout the year is that you definitely
00:15:14
Speaker
As a founder, it's very hard. You don't know anything. You're building something from
Upcoming Events and Closing Remarks
00:15:18
Speaker
scratch. So definitely seek out to ask for help, especially like, for example, you can see people on LinkedIn, entrepreneurs on LinkedIn, or join incubators or accelerators. You definitely need men's force to help guide you and advisors to them.
00:15:37
Speaker
So to sum up, we need networking, trial and error process during all the task management and decision making, procedures and of course to collaborate with people. Thank you so much for your advices. Do you have anything else that you would like to share with us today? Any upcoming projects?
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, so just to recap, our college platform is in August from August 2nd to August 6th. So you can now sign up on our website versionsupport.org. You can sign up to become a speaker, become a mentor if you're in college, but also you can
00:16:17
Speaker
If you're in high school, sign up to join our prepper club. I think it'll be super fun and we're all going to have a lot of prizes, a lot of very helpful workshops, and great people that you will meet in the community. Awesome. We'll definitely be including the link to the prepper club. So I think this is the end of the episode. Thank you so much to everyone that has been listening to the end.
00:16:44
Speaker
It was amazing to have Julia with us today. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you so much for having me. You can find all the first-gen support social media handles in the description below. We also have a very exciting announcement. The new Changemaker Z app will be available in the App Store and Play Store, so stay tuned. Until next time, don't forget to change the world. Bye.
00:17:19
Speaker
We hope you guys enjoyed our conversation. We had such a great time. Make sure you leave us a review. You can also follow us on Instagram at changemaker.c to keep up with all of our new content. We also have a Facebook page called changemakersc, but you'll need to look down because I honestly don't even know how Facebook works.