Turning first-years into leaders

For 24 first-year students, the road to success at Carolina took a three-hour detour west of Chapel Hill and up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Blowing Rock, North Carolina last weekend.

Tucked away in the woods for the annual First-Year Males Student Retreat, the students began to connect with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in a new way: building a new support system that will help them succeed in and out of the classroom.

“It’s really good to step away from the typical campus environment where we are every day,” said Doni Holloway, a first-year early college graduate. “It allows reflection and introspection. Sometimes we can get all tangled up in the campus environment.”

Carolina’s overnight men’s retreat was a cross-campus program hosted by the College of Arts & Sciences’ Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling to provide an opportunity for the students to get away from campus and learn about the resources that can help lead them to graduation.

The Center for Student Success and Academic Counseling partnered with campus organizations including Academic Advising, Housing and Residential Education, and the New Student and Carolina Parent Programs last year to begin holding the official retreat for all first-year male students. Initially offering only 12 spots, this year’s program doubled in size.

Led by student and staff mentors, the program consists of a series of educational sessions covering topics ranging from study skills and resources to personality assessments and goal setting.

“The goal is to help first-year male students who are either traditional students out of high school or transfers to access — in a very tangible, simple way — several resources that will help them navigate not only the first wave of midterms and papers that are happening right now, but also their first semester and first year,” said Chris Faison, coordination of male mentoring and engagement.

Faison said there has been a lack of programs designed to help men learn about resources available to them. The retreat aimed to be a foundation of support.

“As a gender, we tend not to ask for help,” Faison said. “We don’t stop and ask for directions, and it’s similar in college. We need our male students to be supported across the board so that they can not only finish, but finish with their eye toward what they can really do to be great in society and not just get a job to pay the bills.”

Mixing hikes and free time in the mountains with hour-long information sessions, the students spent the overnight trip creating a network of mentors, learning to leverage campus resources and discussing ways to positively impact the University.

“When you hear the amazing goals and aspirations of people in this program, it’s very inspiring and we encourage each other,” Holloway said.

After the program helped connect him to the rest of the University, junior Mason Lantay returned to Blowing Rock this year as a facilitator to help a new group of first-years make the same adjustments.

“In a retreat setting like this, you spend multiple days working with these skills connecting with these people, helping them mature and showing them all the good they can do,” he said. “That can make a huge difference in the University.”

While the retreat works to provide students with a set of tools needed to reach graduation, Lantay said, the program is really designed to turn the new wave of first-year students into the next group of campus leaders.

“We want to turn people into leaders that can not only benefit from this knowledge, but also spread it. That’s the most effective way to make an impact. We are using the retreat to train people up and turn them into leaders who can make all of Carolina a better place.”