FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20, 2005
Contact: Joshua Hollis
(662) 329-7119

BRIDGE Program proves good recruiting tool
  
COLUMBUS, Miss. – Fourteen of the 15 students participating in this year’s BRIDGE Program, offered by Mississippi University for Women’s Office of Diversity Education and Programs, have decided to attend MUW in the fall.
   
The BRIDGE Program is a five-week residential program for incoming minority freshman, in which they take college courses and receive credit. If they decide to attend MUW, the students receive a $1,000 scholarship.
   
Iika McCarter, director of diversity education and programs, runs the BRIDGE Program. She said the program’s main goal is “basically to give students a preview of college before coming to college.”
   
The BRIDGE Program is very much similar to the summer Pre-college Enrichment Program, except that it is limited exclusively to minority students.
   
“My overall goal is to allow students to look at the W. This year’s [goal] was to recruit students who were [actively] looking at the college,” she said.
   
The BRIDGE Program was started in 1991 when the National Science Foundation gave the Mississippi Alliance for Minority Participation (MAMP) a grant for minority students studying science and mathematics. The universities given funds from MAMP were to get the programs up and running and slowly make them self-sustaining, in that they no longer used government funding.
   
McCarter said the students are gradually “getting used to each other,” adding that the program is “progressing nicely.”
   
Shannon Blevins, the student director for the BRIDGE Program, said he came to MUW through the BRIDGE Program and jumped at the opportunity to serve as a counselor. He said he wanted to “give back to someone else the benefits that I had received from being in BRIDGE.”
   
His responsibilities include escorting the students to class and accompanying them to lunch and their community service activities. He also plans the students’ daily recreational activities and study sessions.
   
Blevins said he hopes “the students will gain a sense of survival and an understanding of the characteristics that they will need to possess in order for them to be successful in their college career.”
   
The students participating are from West Point, the Gulf Coast, Jackson, Tupelo and some areas in Alabama.