Empowering First-Generation Students: A Dive into Northeastern University's Torch Scholars Selection

Discover Northeastern University's commitment to First Gen students in the latest First Gen FM podcast episode. Join me, Jen, as I journey solo this week, pulling back the curtain on the scholarship selection process, particularly focusing on the Torch Scholars Program. 

This week's episode shares stories and insights, as I recount the moments from our pre-interview tech checks and share the balance of what we all do,  all the administrative tasks with the human element of our work. You'll hear about the robust support system that Northeastern extends to its First Gen, Pell Grant-eligible scholars – from academic advising to personal guidance. It's a narrative that goes beyond mere academic success; it's about cultivating a nurturing environment where potential is recognized and harnessed. So, listen as I share how we use meta-cognitive variables and a virtual interview process to select these remarkable students at Northeastern University.

Please help others find this podcast by rating and reviewing wherever you listen!

You can find me at https://www.firstgenfm.com/ and on LinkedIn. My email is jen@firstgenfm.com.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hello, I'm Jennifer Shown, your host for the First Gen FN podcast. Please call me Jen. Each week I'll share my insights and ideas, solo or with a special guest, on creating opportunities to celebrate and support the First Gen College and College Bound students we work with. My goal with this podcast is to connect you with other high school and college educators, to share our successes and challenges and create a web of First Gen advocates. Hello, I'm Jen and I'm going solo today.

Speaker 1: 0:42

I want to share a few things about our scholarship selection process because we are in the midst of it this week. It is a very busy week and for any of you who work in education, you probably know all of the administrative details that you get caught up with every day. And so this week I found myself in the middle of all these details as I was getting ready for our interview day on Friday for our torch scholarship at Northeastern, and I happen to have a tech check or what we call a tech check on Tuesday night, and that is an opportunity for us to meet with the students, make sure all their technology works, which was very helpful when the pandemic first started. Now pretty much everybody knows Zoom, but what it does is. It gives me a chance to meet the students when it's not necessarily in a high-stakes setting and it allows them to talk to some current students who also attend the tech check. And that brightened my day so much and showed me once again the good things about the work that I do, the work that you do, in helping first-generation students, pell Grant eligible students, get to college and have that opportunity. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the opportunity that we provide at Northeastern through the Torch Scholars Program. I think it's important at first to talk a little bit about history, the history of Northeastern and the history of the Torch Scholars Program.

Speaker 1: 2:13

So Northeastern was born about literally 125 years ago out of the YMCA in Boston on Huntington Ave, and that was the first YMCA in the country. And so Northeastern started there as a school for young men who were working and wanted to get their degree while they were working. So it was an evening school and as Northeastern developed and offered more degrees, it became very much a commuter campus and there were far more parking lots and parking spaces than there were academic buildings and people would commute in and go to classes and at that point Northeastern was fairly open admission and at one point they had 60,000 students attending Northeastern University. Now that is very different from the university we know today, and what happened was another state college came along in the Boston area, umass. Boston took the same students Northeastern was serving, but at a much less expensive cost for tuition Still a commuter campus. So two commuter campuses competing, one private, one public and Northeastern started to lose ground. And so what they did was they retrenched, they built residence halls, they became more selective, but they also realized they had to do more retention efforts, because it was great to have 60,000 people and if they came or went that didn't much matter. But now that we have fewer students we had to make sure we were keeping them. And so then, over time, northeastern got more and more selective. Until one of the alums a very well off alum who had done very well said you don't seem to be accepting students like me anymore, and that was Mr Anthony Manganero, who founded the torch scholarship with his funding, along with Philly Mantella, who was then a vice president for student life, and so between the two of them they created the torch scholarship program, which is very unique in that it has its own separate admissions process.

Speaker 1: 4:23

And I want to tell you what that is, what we look for and who's eligible. Especially with any college admissions program you are looking for students who can succeed at the institution that you're at. So we are looking at the students' academic record to see are they prepared? Have they taken college prep courses? Can they succeed academically? Can they thrive academically at our institution? But we're adding an extra sentence to that Can they succeed at our institution with the support that we offer them? So we have a three-person office that offers academic advising as well as personal guidance I won't call it counseling, because it's not mental health counseling, but certainly it's personal advising and then activities to connect them to all of the other offices and resources that are at a large research institution like Northeastern. So that's the question that we're asking when we look at their transcripts, and we're also looking at the transcripts with an eye to has the student had some adversity that has made their transcript not reveal their full potential? Because a lot of the students who are coming from the large public high schools may have an educational disadvantage, may have a socioeconomic disadvantage, may just have had some life things happen to them that has made it difficult for them to succeed a year, a particular year in their high school experience. So we really contextualize their transcript along with all of the other information that they share. So we're looking to see does the student have the minimum to succeed at Northeastern with the support that we provide, which is kind of unlike what a highly selective institution like Northeastern is looking for where they're like? We're measuring the best and brightest by that, like full AP, full IB courses, the absolute ceiling of where they can perform academically. So that's one thing that's a little different in our selection process. But I think the main thing that's different is that we very much wait.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Metacognitive variables, non-cognitive variables, if you wanna call them that. I like metacognitive. So William Sedlasek used the term non-cognitive variables to mean things that are not necessarily academic related, like standardized tests and transcripts and high school courses and the rigor of high school courses. Angela Duckworth says I don't really like that non-cognitive because it means there's no thought going into these other variables, but that's not true. So she liked to use the term metacognitive. So I'm going with Angela and I'm going with metacognitive, and so the things that we like to really look at there are the things that we know students need to succeed beyond the classroom and in the classroom too.

Speaker 1: 7:20

But to succeed at Northeastern, and the three things that we've really value and we look for in all stages of the selection process are help seeking behavior and the ability to build a support system. Teamwork, because we have a cohort model and we like and expect them to learn to work together to accomplish some of the tasks. They need to, whether it's in the four week summer immersion program before they get to campus or when they're on campus to have that nice, solid group of 15 other students other first gen students that they can rely on. And then, along with support, help seeking behavior and teamwork, we're also looking at leadership, and we define that very broadly. So leadership within a job that they've held, leadership in terms of the clubs and organizations they've participated in at their place of worship with their family, all of those things constitute leadership and teamwork, and so we value those very highly.

Speaker 1: 8:31

We look for those throughout the application when we're reviewing the students for the scholarship and whether to see if we want to interview them and bring them, not bring them on campus. We used to bring them on campus for interview day, but now we do it virtually so to bring them, invite them to interview day, the reason we look at these skills so closely in their letters of recommendation, in their essay, in their student activities list and in the nomination that students have to send in, where we ask very specific questions about those metacognitive variables. We know that those are the traits, the skills that students need to succeed at Northeastern and in our program, especially help seeking behavior. If we see evidence of that, really positive evidence of that, in their high school experience, then we know that that's likely to continue. Maybe not right away because our students are so independent and do try to get things done on their own, but we know that we can teach them and bring that out as, if you ask for help, we are here to provide that, as are so many other places on the Northeastern campus. So those are the things that we look at because we know those will help our students be successful.

Speaker 1: 9:51

So we're about to go into interview day on Friday where we'll bring students online in a Zoom call and it's about three hours of activities that they'll do. So they'll have two one-on-one interviews, about 25 minutes each. Then they have a break, then they do a group process where we see how they get along with each other, who has something to share, who invites others to participate, who is a good listener, who's a good leader, and we have the committee members observe that. And then we have an academic session where students are asked to read an article not too dense, because we do understand that they're high school students but we ask them to read something and then prepare a question to bring in with them. So we kind of flip the classroom to do that and then they bring their question and we have a conversation. So we see, do they prepare, how do they bring up their question, how do they listen to others? And then how do they add to the conversation and maybe talk through things that are controversial, maybe too strong a word, but really thought-provoking issues that our students are dealing with all the time and will face again when they come to our campus, especially because at Northeastern, being a first-generation student and being a less affluent student makes you different.

Speaker 1: 11:15

So that's what our selection program looks like and, of course, during our selection we have lots of opportunities, as I said, with the tech check that I started out with. That got me all excited about our Friday interview coming up During the interview day. We also do a student panel, which is moderated, but then all of us who are part of the selection team leave and we just leave current scholars, current torch scholars with the perspective students to talk to each other without any of the selection folks, any of the older adults in the room to listen in, and we have them ask any questions that they want to, and we like to think our students are a little freer to give answers without us there as well. So that's what our interview day looks like. My hope in sharing this is A just a little bit about the excitement of the new students.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Talking to students who are still in high school about their hopes and their dreams and what they want to accomplish, being able to run a scholarship program where I get to give students scholarship funds that I know will have an impact on their experience at Northeastern and allow them to do things that they may not get a chance to do, whether that's studying abroad or research or doing different co-op experiences, because experiential learning is important at Northeastern. But what I would like your takeaway to be is to think about what skills do your students at your school need to be successful and how are those being measured in something like the admissions process or any selection process that you have. Once we get our students familiarized with how college works and with all of the resources available to them and we show them that it's important to ask for help and to know how to ask for help and to be comfortable in that, then we know that we can kind of step back a little and watch them soar. And it is such an amazing experience, just developmentally, to see these students as come in as first years, as high school students, not knowing how college works, and then by the time they're a senior and doing their capstone and sharing what they've learned and what they plan on doing next. It is just as you know, if you work at education, that's the payoff. That is the most wonderful experience we could possibly have.

Speaker 1: 13:50

So, knowing what skills your students need to be successful, I hope you think about that a little bit. And then, what do they need to enter with? Whatever? Is it a program that you're running? Is it the school itself? What can you teach is the important question, as well as how much time do you have to teach that. So what do they need to come in with automatically? What can you teach and how much time will you have to teach it if you do have to teach it. And so I think those are really big questions to ask when you're thinking about what kind of program can we run? Who are we selecting? We're selecting both to enter Northeastern and for a full everything tuition room and board, books, fees, insurance, technology, fund, scholarship so what do they need to have when they come in and what can we help teach them? And then we design everything after that around retention to prepare them for success in college and success after college. And again we said that help seeking, behavior building, support, teamwork, leadership those are the experiences that if they bring them, we know that we can work with them to build on those and they will have incredible successes when they get here. I hope I've given you some food for thought. I'm always happy to talk about the Torch Scholars Program and the incredible first generation students that I get to meet through the process of selection as well as once they come to the university and we get those students here. I just wish we had more funding to have more students selected as part of the Torch Scholars Program.

Speaker 1: 15:33

I would love to hear how you do selection for programs that you are running with first gen students. What are the metacognitive variables that you're measuring, that you're looking for in your selection? How do you answer some of these questions about the skills your students need to be successful? I would love to hear that you can always contact me at gen. That's J-E-N at firstgenfmcom. It's always great if you leave a rating and review so that other people can find this podcast. This was my first solo podcast. I hope that you got some good information from it. I hope maybe some food for thought, as I said, with some of the questions that I asked, maybe some of the takeaways that you can think about. And always I would love to hear from you because I appreciate your listening. Thank you so much and thank you for listening. I agree with you.