PrincetonUniversity
 

Members of the Princeton Girls Leadership Summit, (seated from left) Anaiya Fitzgerald, Kateleigh Denchak and Ruth Morrow, talk about applying to college with two of the program's organizers, Princeton sophomores Allison Arensman and Jessica Kantor (standing).

Photo: Denise Applewhite

Class assignment flourishes as mentoring program for local girls

by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann
It's a Saturday morning, and four Princeton students sitting around a table at Frist Campus Center are being peppered with questions from a group of high school girls. Today's topic is getting ready for college.

"Should I take AP English?" asked Jenna Elson, who is 16.

"Do they look at the number of AP and honors classes you take?" asked 15-year-old Fatima Montaño.

"Did you have a college you really had your heart set on?" asked Anaiya Fitzgerald, 16.

The gathering is the fourth session of the Princeton Girls Leadership Summit, a new program for high school-age daughters of Princeton employees. The program was developed by five Princeton students who wanted to create a way for girls to interact with University students and professors while developing leadership skills.

The project grew out of a class assignment in the freshman seminar taught by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, a lecturer in sociology, that Allison Arensman, Maureen Monagle and Adrienne Hadley took last year. (Jessica Kantor '04 and Lauren Kapsky '05 joined them this year to help run the program.) The students had to develop a plan for a community-based project; they came up with an outline for a mentoring program involving college women and high school girls.

After finishing the class assignment, the students decided to try to make the program a reality. They met with Janet Dickerson, vice president for campus life, who suggested they talk to someone in the Office of Human Resources, which ended up giving them a grant to fund the program. The Center for Community Service, the Undergraduate Student Government's Projects Board and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students also are sponsors.

"We're not trying to get them to go to Princeton," Arensman said. "We're trying to get them to know that they're capable of going to college, and that college can put them in a position to do pretty much anything they want to in life."

For more information about the Girls Leadership Summit, contact Allison Arensman.

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.