EXPANDING YOUNG MINDS Elementary students experience ECU, Harriot College opportunities

This spring, ECU’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions and to bring nearly 100 elementary students to tour campus subjects, programs and careers they can pursue through the Sixty students from Benvenue Elementary School in Rocky from Stateside Elementary in Jacksonville visited during the April. The fifth grade students explored many areas of campus. on opportunities and learned how there is an area of study for

“The students had an amazing time. This was a great program and allowed us the opportunity to expand the minds of our students to all the career possibilities and opportunities outside of Rocky Mount that they may not have been able to see and experience otherwise,” said Chelsea Wiggins, Benvenue Elementary fifth grade teacher.

Yanira Campos, former assistant director of outreach and relations for admissions, said her goal in bringing young kids to campus from surrounding rural communities was to demonstrate what is available to them at ECU.

Campos, who is a first-generation Latina college graduate, received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from ECU in 2016. She said many students at ECU are from diverse economic and socio-economic backgrounds.

“We show them college is possible for them,” she said. “You’ll find people here with common interests.”

During the campus visits, students heard from faculty, staff and graduate students from Harriot College’s departments of anthropology, biology, chemistry, criminal justice and criminology, economics, foreign languages and literatures, history, physics, political science and neuroscience studies multidisciplinary program.

“This was a huge eye-opener for our students. It carved ECU — the best university in all of N.C. — into their brains,” Wiggins said. “They’ll remember this experience for a lifetime, and hopefully when it’s time for college applications, ECU will remain first in their mind.”