GEAR UP* calling again. We are seeking volunteers to help with a visit to UTC’s campus for our 10th and 11th grade students next week, and we hope you can help.
Our students will come to UTC to participate in Reality Check, a game that assigns students a grown up life and then asks them to figure out how to pay for it. After students learn the job they hold, the salary they make, and the bills that go with all of that, they proceed to various stations to pay for utilities, childcare, car notes, rent, the all-important college loan payment, and all the other obligations you are no doubt painfully aware of but our students have never considered. In the process, our kids learn how educational choices affect career options, how buying the cool car might mean giving up the European vacation, and how smart planning leads to desired outcomes.
If you can help, you would hold down one of the bill-paying stations, which would set you up to advise and guide our students through their brush with adulthood. This will give our kids the important chance to mix it up with college students who can talk with them about how to hammer out a path to success. Our kids don’t know many people like you who have made it to college and are now pointed toward the fulfilling future college can bring, and meeting you at Reality Check would give them a great look at where they want to go.
If you can help, we need volunteers for the following times:
February 22nd 3:00 – 5:00
Location – Mapp Building, Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, room 219. This is on UTC’s campus – corner of 8th & Houston Streets – and if you’ve never been there, the Center for Innovation & Enterprise is definitely in the running for UTC’s coolest space.
We appreciate the interest UTC has shown in GEAR UP & our students in the past and we really hope this will give us a chance to connect with you. If you can help out, please email me (hunter-huckabay@utc.edu) and I’ll send all details your way.
Thanks for any help you can give us, and you can be sure any time you spend with a GEAR UP student will have a lasting impact. Thanks,
Hunter
* Just to remind you, GEAR UP is UTC’s outreach program to urban students who attend schools that have not historically sent many students to college. GEAR UP exists to change that & your involvement in our work shows our first generation students that college can happen!
Hunter Huckabay, Ph.D.
Director of GEAR UP