Counseling and Diversity
Ashley Bryant QC 15 and Jim Stellar
Ashley took my large general education lecture class that I co-teach in the spring. That led us to a conversation about how we best help students find their way through the college experience and particularly in an institution as diverse as Queens College with students who are from many different and often mixed backgrounds. Ashley is part of our peer mentoring program and from an ethnic Filipino-Irish background. You can see where this is going.
Ashley, would you open by commenting on the peer mentoring program and specifically how it might address the issue of a diverse population?
The peer counseling program is open to any student on the Queens College campus that is in need of speaking about their concerns with academics and emotional conflicts. The students in the program already represent a small sector of the diverse population of Queens since the counselors with whom I have become friends are of different ethnicities and religions other than mine. One of my fellow counselors lived in Jamaica for most of her life and came to Queens College a year ago and applied to become a Peer Counselor. She told me how difficult it was to transition from living in Jamaica to living in New York and on top of that, becoming a Peer Counselor which required her to learn the correct body language and questions needed to counsel a student. However, because of her experience of being a transfer student and the uncertainty that accompanies it, she is able to easily relate to those who are minorities and transfer students and allow the students to feel comfortable around her.
She is one of many in the program including myself, who can allow a student to be more comfortable during sessions because we share a commonality of being diverse and also being a student in Queens College. From my own personal experiences I feel that I am flexible with addressing a diverse population. Like I mentioned before I am Asian/Caucasian, I understand the Asian tradition of working hard and setting up high standards for yourself however, I also understand how stressful and demanding that can be when your culture expects more from you than you do. Because of this pressure put on me I’ve always been a bookworm which led to me being bullied in school. The bullying I experienced is one of the major reasons that led me to be a peer counselor and help others with similar stressors.
I can see how common experience, and particularly in areas of cultural expectations and fitting in (e.g. bullying), could help you help a student from a diverse population better adapt to the college experience. Indeed this is the general expectation of putting young people into difficult situations.
I want to talk about how your experience here helped clarify your career goals, but before you do that, tell us about another experience you are having as part of the CUNY Service Corps. As an introduction, let me say that this program is brand new and is on seven City University of New York (CUNY) campuses, including our Queens College. It offers the opportunity to about 100 students for two terms of 12-15 hours per week of paid community service. Tell us about your experience.
Being part of the CUNY Service Corps has been a wonderful experience, from pre-training to placement work. During pre-training members of the Corps are taught leadership and interpersonal skills for people to learn how to cooperate on a team and how to work in a job setting. For example, the members would engage in role-plays where one person would pretend to be an employee from a different ethnic background and another employee would want to ask questions about the other employee’s ethnicity and religion without coming off as offensive or rude. Other role-plays would include members given mock scenarios of a program that will be run for their placement site e.g. (Installing a non-profit health program for all ages) and the CUNY Service Corps members would work in small groups and write up ideas on how this program would manifest itself into a reality. The pre-training for the CUNY Service Corps isn’t exactly typical pre-training for normal job placement but, it definitely directly correlated with the site I was placed at.
I currently work at Queens Central Library where I assist library customers in homework, activities, and programs as a Teen Programming Assistant. I work on a team of fifteen with other Teen Programming Assistants where we plan out programs for teenagers to participate in. This is where our pre-training we received at Queens College comes into action, where my coworkers and I work as team mates to come up with interesting and fun programs. Some of the many programs we have run include: science experiments, teen talks, nail art, scavenger hunts, and Christmas ornament making. Our programs’ success depends solely on the interest of the teenagers but, together as a unit we are starting to figure out what does and doesn’t interest a teenager and are constantly working to improve the library.
Thank you. Now let’s get back to your career development. I know you have applied to graduate school for next year. Tell us how the peer counseling and CUNY Service Corps experiences affected that choice.
The peer counseling program and CUNY Service Corps have definitely helped in my ultimate goal of getting a Master’s degree in social work but, I would not say that they are the causation of my choice. My choice to go into the field of social work and partake in a Psychology bachelor’s degree is because of previous life experiences that I have been affected with. While I do not feel comfortable going into detail about these life experiences, I can say that bullying as mentioned before is one of them. In my career, I want to help others as I myself would’ve wanted help when I couldn’t receive it. I’ve also genuinely always had a huge love for anything scientific including the social sciences where I found psychology most intriguing starting back when I was in elementary school.
Being a Peer Counselor has helped me hone my skills as a counselor and taught me the practical maneuvers needed to help someone in a clinical setting. However, being a member of the CUNY Service Corps and employee of Queens Central Library has taught me creative maneuvers on how to help somebody. Being a Teen Programming Assistant requires a lot of thought and brain-storming, it’s not easy to come up with a program and getting the materials beforehand takes weeks of planning in advance. However, what I do know is that the programs we have run so far have brought a smile on teenager’s faces as they have thoroughly enjoyed it which is fulfilling to me and my coworkers. But, what I think my coworkers and I can agree on is that we help each other most of all. My coworkers from the library are just as diverse as my friends in the peer counseling program. We are all different ethnicities but, we all also have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to our majors and the field of work we are heading into. Together we blend our ideals and understand each other’s differences which helps us communicate with the diverse crowd at the library and each other. Going into graduate school, I have always been open-minded to ethnicity as I myself am multiracial but, I feel well-rounded as I have now experienced diversity both internally from being born into it, and externally from working in a diverse population.
The peer mentoring program and the CUNY Service Corps are both experiences that fit with both diversity and Ashley’s individual history. It is this synchrony that makes them real in a way that it is harder to achieve in the classical academic curriculum. Thus both of these programs bring strength to Ashley’s academic development. What is also evident in both the nature of the peer program and in this very conversation, is the reflection on those experiences to join them to the academic goals – in this case graduate school in the field of Social Work. What I believe is that the ideas expressed in the academic discipline, the very facts and theories taught in the classroom, are deepened and made more fluid and part of the student’s own thinking if they are seen in practice as described above. It is more than just a passion for the field that causes the student to work harder; it is a more mature understanding of the information in the field itself that comes from connecting the topic with the student’s personal characteristics and life history.
