Though University alum Joilyn Stephenson signed up for the Michigan College Advising Corps to help give Michigan high school students the tools to attend colleges like the University, after a few months working at Pontiac High School, she says the students have had an impact on her as well.

“Some of these students come from a difficult background, but they still have it in their heart to make the most out of their future,” Stephenson wrote in an e-mail interview. “That in itself is amazing.”

Stephenson is one of eight recent University graduates currently working in Michigan public schools to help students from underserved districts apply to and attend college. Each adviser in the program, which the University launched in April, works full-time in a school with traditionally low college matriculation rates.

Christopher Rutherford, College Advising Corps program manager at the Center for Educational Outreach, said the program has four primary goals.

“Those goals are first centered around increasing the number of students that go on to four-year institutions,” Rutherford said. “The second goal is to increase the types of institutions or the range of institutions that those students go on to. The third is to build, to increase, the number of students that finish college, and finally the goal is to create a college-going culture in some of our underserved schools.”

Rutherford said participating University graduates work to create an atmosphere of excitement about college within their assigned schools, as well as help students to attend a university that will be a good fit.

“One of the things we find is that many of the students that are eligible to go to college have misinformation as to how to get there, and often times don’t even apply,” he said. “And then there are students who may apply to say a community college but are capable of attending, say, a four-year institution.”

And according to Stephenson, helping students get the right resources to apply to and attend college has been extremely rewarding.

“It’s normal and expected for a student from an affluent family to go to college, but it really feels great to see someone off to college that came from a family where higher education was never considered an option,” Stephenson wrote.

Rutherford said he believes that students who have just graduated from the University are able to guide and help students in a way that traditional high school counselors cannot.

“We believe in the ‘near peer’ model, that because our students are recent graduates of U of M they are closer in age and ideas to the students they’ll be serving,” Rutherford said. “We’ve found that advisors develop a different rapport with students than the way students look at their teachers, because they aren’t looked at as part of an institution.”

Megan Sims-Fujita, College Corps adviser at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, said that in addition to being in a unique position to talk to students, she has time that normal counselors do not to focus exclusively on college applications.

“I’m here just as an additional resource and my sole purpose is to help kids go to college,” Sims-Fujita said. “So, it’s nice, because I don’t have a lot of the other tedious responsibilities of scheduling and things. I’m really here to talk about college.”

In addition to one-on-one advising, Fujita said she works on building a “college-going culture” at Loy Norrix.

“That can be really big or it can be really little,” Fujita said. “It can be hanging a poster about a college on the wall, which is really easy, or it can be planning a college night or meeting with parents.”

College Corps advisers are selected through an application and interview process that allows high school administrators to interact directly with and select an adviser, and vice versa, to ensure that the adviser will fit in the school community.