Summer Success for Rising Seniors
By Chelsea Jupin
Sho Toloue, a Henry Street college counselor, stood in front of mouth-watering image of brightly colored macarons projected on a screen. “Do we have any bakers here today?” she asked. The macarons, unfortunately, were not a snack, but rather a tool that Sho and Izzy Fortuna, another college counselor, were using to teach the rising high school seniors attending Henry Street University (HSU), the agency’s summer college prep intensive. HSU is the summer program of the Settlement’s Expanded Horizons year-round college prep services.
This summer, the more than 60 students in HSU are visiting college campuses, getting help with applications and scholarship forms, and participating in essay writing classes and admissions workshops.
In this lesson, held at Henry Street’s ATTAIN Computer Lab, Sho and Izzy walked students through the different admissions processes. The students also set up profiles on College Greenlight, a free service aimed at making it simpler for first generation and underrepresented students to attend their dream colleges. With their own profiles in front of them on the ATTAIN Lab’s computers, Izzy walked them through the site so that they would be familiar with it and continue to use it while applying for colleges this year.
One student, Daniel Garcia, a rising senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, finds HSU valuable. “It’s an interesting experience because in high school, they don’t go through the process in detail,” said Daniel. He hopes to attend Stanford or Boston University to double major in neuroscience and psychology, and is grateful for HSU for making that dream more attainable.
“A lot of students hear that college is expensive, so you have to pick the least expensive choice,” he said. “They don’t know of the different opportunities. Henry Street program does a good job of informing kids what’s available and opening doors to scholarships and grants, so you can apply to college with a little more ease.”
