More than 1,000 Southern California community college students, including 24 Brahmas gathered Friday April 29 at the 17th Student Transfer Outreach and Mentor Program (STOMP) to learn more about the opportunities UC campuses offer.
The Transfer Center provided a free bus to take students to UCLA where the STOMP Conference was held in Ackerman Grand Ballroom. Prospective students and admitted transfer students were received by UCLA faculty, and encouraged to participate in all it offered.
Karina Salcido, communication major and UCLA leadership representative was one of the tour guides.
“This is our 17th annual, and a lot of things we take from surveys that people have responded [help decide the events for today],” Salcido said. “We use that information from previous conferences, and use that to keep tailoring it to future conferences.”
The featured workshops included Admissions Presentations, UC Panel, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) Panels, Resources for Parenting Students, Tours, Summer Opportunities and a Department Fair.
STOMP Co-Chairs Jewel Bourne and Lucy Plasencia organized the conference and went through months of planning and preparing volunteers with their leadership team for the long awaited date.
“I’m on the leadership team, so we met every week for the past two months, and we’ve been non stop, especially this week,” Salcido said. “For our volunteers we’ve been keeping them up through email and provided them with tour guides, well at least for my component.”
The Department Fair gave attendees the opportunity to talk with members of different departments such as Applied Linguistics, Nursing and Physics & Astronomy. Sister UC representatives participated in the fair as another approach to provide exposure to UC environments across California.
A variety of workshops were held and among them was one focused on summer programs that are available for those interested.
According to Program Coordinator for the Center for Community Colleges Partnership Chely Gonzalez, who led the workshop on summer programs, these workshops present students with first hand experience of life at UCLA. By completing the summer programs students are given the chance to join a mentorship program.
“Our mentors work with students to help provide insight and a student’s perspective into the transfer process,” Gonzalez said. “There’s a lot of things that students can know about transferring that can come from a counselor or an admissions representative but hearing it from a someone that recently went through the process itself gives it a different feel.”
The housing tour lead by volunteers and resident life Allison Duffy, Imelda Islas and Samir Ahmed guided groups of students to the housing buildings Holly and Gardena specifically as those two are primarily designated to transfer students.
“A lot of people consider staying in the dorms at least their first year,” Salcido said. “So we thought that it was very imperative for students to actually see the dorms that are offered especially for students because there are transfer communities.”
Yu-Ning Chen, sociology major at Pierce, said her favorite part of the event was that it gave students the time to ask questions and learn about the campus.
“It was really useful, all the resources and workshops,” Chen said.