Students at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this summer founded their own kind of university-Student U.
The program, launched in June, brings students from local universities to serve as teachers and mentors to middle-school students from Durham Public Schools.
"Our first summer was a great success," said Student U. Executive Director Daniel Kimberg, Trinity '07.
This summer, college students instructed rising sixth graders in core academic subjects and a variety of electives at the program's Durham Academy summer-program site.
"The theme for our summer was the [Mahatma] Gandhi quote, 'Be the change you want to see in the world,'" Kimberg said. "By the end of the summer, I believe each student and teacher left with the belief that all people can make a difference in the world and left with some of the skills necessary to do so."
Kimberg added that he believes the evaluations of Student U.-which are still being processed-will indicate that the sixth graders returned to school with new attitudes about education and improved academic skills.
DPS students are not the only beneficiaries of the program, Michael Ülkü-Steiner, director of DA Upper School and a member of the Student U. Advisory Board, wrote in an e-mail.
"Thanks to Student U., we have dozens of upper-schoolers headed into year-round tutor roles," he said. "Again, this is opening up doors of relationships for our [DA] students and offering them real-world opportunities to teach and learn."
Tutors and teachers commit to a year-long involvement with Student U., and students will take part in the program through their eighth-grade year, Kimberg said.
Terry Hsieh, a freshman at Oberlin College and a DA graduate, said his involvement in the program this summer as an English teacher and mentor made him think about himself differently.
"You discover that in having to give yourself to your students, you discover who you are a little," he said. "To give of yourself, you have to know yourself.... I learned that I'm a much more compassionate person than I had made myself out to be."
He added that although he attends college out of state, unlike most of the student teachers in the program, he intends to continue his involvement by attending Student U. events when he is home. Kimberg noted that tutors and students have already planned social outings for the fall.
Ülkü-Steiner said that he thought the program will continue to have a positive effect on the Durham community in the future.
"We have unprecedented excitement about a program envisioned and run by twenty-somethings, staffed by college students and teenagers and full of hungry middle schoolers," he said. "It's hard to communicate the magic of that excitement.... It's truly electric, and has the potential to keep changing [Durham Academy] and [Durham Public Schools] and-more poignantly-the lives of those teachers and students for the better."
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