Rising Scholars Start Their First Year Off Right

Rising Scholars Start Their First Year Off Right

By Lisa Ann Villarreal, Ph.D., Executive Director for Academic Success

The first year of college presents academic and social challenges most students have never faced. Each August, Menlo College helps to ease that transition by hosting the ten-day Rising Scholars summer math and English bridge program. Participants arrive early and become familiar with the campus, work closely with faculty who teach first-year students, learn about campus resources, and develop friendships with other incoming students.

The program focuses on collaborative learning through problem-solving. The ten days include daytime classroom sessions and evening activities, featuring invited speakers, movies and discussion, a storytelling event, networking events, and day and evening trips to explore the Bay Area. This year, Rising Scholars visited the de Young Museum to view and discuss an exhibit of works by Faith Ringgold, whose “story quilts” document her experience within the civil rights movement.

The exhibit fit within the Rising Scholars 2022 theme of activism: how to promote change, when and why people speak out, and the barriers that exist to effecting change in society. After several days of reading about and discussing different aspects of activism, students developed their own creative research projects, applying the skills they were learning to investigate a topic that mattered to them. Many students chose to research aspects of activism that related to their own experience or that would affect them as new college students, while others chose to learn about something new. The projects explored topics from economic policy to climate change, consumer boycotts to gun control. Students leave the Rising Scholars program with greater confidence in their college readiness and their ability to succeed in their courses.

The program helped me significantly improve my data analysis skills as a first-year student.

- Paul Breuer ’26

Incoming Finance major Paul Breuer ’26 drew on his personal experience, writing about the Fridays for Future youth movement to combat climate change founded by Greta Thunberg, which gained popularity in Breuer’s native Germany while he was in high school. The opportunity to build on his first-hand knowledge by completing research in the Bowman Library helped Breuer to hone the skills he would need for his Fall classes: “The program helped me significantly improve my data analysis skills as a first-year student. Also, the project work and the related research prepared us well for the first semester and familiarized everyone with the daily tasks we currently solve in class.”

It is great to share the experiences we make every day with someone who goes through the same and also has to deal with living abroad and away from their family for the first time.

Elisa Lehman ’26, a Munich native, lauds the social aspects of the program. “I was afraid of moving to another country where I knew nobody and where I had never been before. The Rising Scholars program really helped me in the process of building a new life and making new friends here at Menlo. I am thankful for all the opportunities the instructors gave me here and the way they helped me to integrate myself. I met one of my best friends, Ludivine, through this program and now we still spend a lot of time together. It is great to share the experiences we make every day with someone who goes through the same and also has to deal with living abroad and away from their family for the first time.

“Thanks to the Rising Scholars program I had much more confidence in my English to approach others and welcome my fellow first-years.”

Ludivine David ’26 of Paris also stresses the benefits to international students. “The program helped me to make new friends because we were a small group and we were all in the same situation. In addition, the classes that this program provided helped me to improve my English. After speaking for one week with other international students, I was much more comfortable and ready to begin. By the time orientation came around, I already had a good friend in Elisa, and thanks to the Rising Scholars program I had much more confidence in my English to approach others and welcome my fellow first-years.”