High school students thriving under PFW’s TRIO Upward Bound

Thirty-six students from around the area spent part of their summer break in the TRIO Upward Bound Program at Purdue University Fort Wayne. The high schoolers came from New Haven, North Side, South Side, Wayne, and New Tech Academy.

Participants got to take academic courses for high school and college credit, but also gained experience with activities such as candle making, using clay to create their own mugs, and volunteering at Lutheran Life Villages. Specialized instruction focused on leadership and financial literacy, and students even stayed overnight in Student Housing on the Waterfield Campus for two weeks.

This precollege program includes a nine-month calendar to help set up income-eligible and first-generation college-bound students for success in and out of the classroom. TRIO Upward Bound at PFW has produced salutatorians, valedictorians, and others who have earned acclaimed scholarship honors. The goal is to show seniors a variety of college majors and career paths.

“We’re always looking for ways to partner with other departments to increase our visibility and introduce our students to this campus and what is available here,” said Sunila Chowdhry, PFW’s program director.

The number of participants fluctuates every year; some eventually attend PFW, including those who transfer in after starting college elsewhere.

One particular aspect of the opportunities achieved new importance this summer. Under the direction of Sara Underwood, B.A. ’14, academic specialist, the program teamed with staff at Helmke Library to introduce six students to archiving. Working with Luna Maldonado-Velez, assistant librarian, the students learned to identify, categorize, and scan newspaper articles into a database. Some of the articles were more than 50 years old and falling apart.

“I’m very proud of the amount of work they have done, and they have discovered some very interesting pieces,” Maldonado-Velez said. “They’ve had to do some sleuthing on some of them to find the little tricks that we do in library work that help us identify where they come from, and they have enjoyed the challenge.”

The students scanned more than 300 articles over three weeks, an effort that was designed to extend the originals’ accessibility well into the future.  

“I’ve learned a lot more about the archiving process, because there’s only so much you can find online,” said Giana Carvalho from New Tech Academy. “It’s been very interesting and helpful to be able to see what the process is like and how it works.”

Carvalho’s current hope is to become an archivist at a history museum, but also said this will help with her research papers in college.

“I enjoyed getting an experience in archiving because before this I never really understood what that was about,” said Terry Sher, a South Side senior. “I got to see that there are more job opportunities in a library than just working at the front desk. There are all these behind-the-scenes things that happen and way more to do.”