While most UNM students are still enjoying their summer, a group of 28 freshmen are completing their fourth week of intensive academic study.
They are participating in the Minority Engineering, Mathematics and Science summer bridge program, which is in its eighth year and is held annually for minority freshmen interested in careers in engineering, math, science and computer science.
Tom Cummings, the program’s associate director and summer bridge coordinator, said students are put through eight hours of intensive study daily, which includes expository English, engineering design, computer science and 10 hours a week of math. In addition, students attend two hours of academic excellence workshops every evening.
Marco Romero, the program’s senior tutoring director, said the summer bridge program is purposely intense to give students an inkling of what the next six years of their life will be like.
Statistics provided by the Minority Engineering, Mathematics and Science Center show that students who have participated in the program are retained at a higher rate in engineering, math and science school programs.
Cummings said the improved retention is because the program prepares students so they can excel.
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“In other words, instead of just getting by, because they’re coming in from high school where a lot of them did very little work and still got As and Bs, and when that does not happen the first year,” he said. “They’ve really got to wake up to the fact that it’s competitive.”
Ephraim Anderson, a freshman from Shiprock, agreed that the expectations at the college level are much different than from high school, especially in English.
“The work you do in high school is not what they want now,” he said.
The summer bridge program also allows the students to assimilate to college life by living in the UNM dorms for four weeks, getting acquainted with the University, making friends and meeting faculty.
“Introduction of how college life is — that’s one thing that people around here, I guess, lack sometimes because they go into college thinking it’s just like high school but it’s actually not,” said Jeanine Haskie, a freshman from Zuni who plans to study computer engineering.
To balance the grind of eight hours of daily classroom study and two hours of academic excellence workshops, the program coordinators schedules a variety of leisurely activities for weekends.
