Giving HOPE to high school students
The Student Initiated Access Center houses service projects that aim to increase access to higher education for students from disadvantaged areas.
The Higher Opportunity Program for Education is one such project. Each week, UCLA students travel to Westminster, San Gabriel Valley and Chinatown to provide high school students with tutoring and peer mentoring.
Because of budget cuts, SIAC faces a serious threat to how well it can fulfill each project’s mission. Below is a letter from a student involved in HOPE:
Dear Chancellor Block,
It has come to my attention that funds for HOPE will be cut because of the economic crisis we are in right now. However, I hope you will take HOPE’s contributions to students into consideration before cutting its funds.
Throughout my four years in HOPE, I’ve seen it improve every year. All the staff do their best to meet the needs of students. Whether it’s homework help, community service, leadership, peer advising or so much more, they provide a valuable service for the students.
I always struggled with math and science classes, but my parents could never help me because of their little education. Also, it was much easier asking the HOPE staff about college life than asking the teachers at school. It’s as if they’re our older brothers and sisters that we never had.
I cannot stress enough how much HOPE has done for me throughout my high school years. Therefore, though I am graduating this year, I hope my fellow students experience the same thing I experienced.
I don’t want them to miss out on meeting some of the most amazing people. I want them to look forward to Thursday every week like I do. So please, I urge you to take into consideration all of the things that students would miss out on before cutting funds.
Sincerely,
Qi Hong Li
Chatsworth High School
Class of 2009
Anjali Rodrigues
Third-year, American literature and culture
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Tours are an integral part of UCLA
I’m offended and irritated by Nikki Jagerman’s latest column (“Nosy tours turn UCLA into a zoo,” April 23).
The campus tours serve an integral and necessary part of life on campus.
Whether because of a campus tour or not, Jagerman decided to go to UCLA.
I’m sure at least one contributing factor to her decision and that of many others is that our campus routinely attracts some of the best and the brightest, and, as a result, our campus is a vibrant and active one.
Chances are, the students in Jagerman’s classes, her friends and other respectable students took a campus tour before deciding to attend UCLA.
Our tours serve tens of thousands of students each year.
In my four years as a tour guide, I have personally shown upward of 5,000 students and parents around campus, and not once has a prospective student or parent on my tour asked for an autograph from or posed for a picture with a current student.
However, even if such actions were commonplace, they would represent an extremely minor interruption in comparison to the huge benefits provided by campus tours.
Students should recognize these benefits extend to the campus as a whole and to every single current student.
Campus tours help recruit talented and diverse students to round out our already amazing student body.
Hopefully, this benefit is incentive enough to overlook any tiny inconveniences the tours may cause.
Each year, UCLA recruits thousands of students to choose our campus over schools like Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and ‘SC.
UCLA’s tour guides are knowledgeable, articulate and personable and are consistently told by prospective students and parents that our tours are among the best in the nation.
We talk not only about the beautiful and vibrant campus but also about the quality of student life here.
To do this, we must show the school in all its glory ““ for example, at noon on a Tuesday.
Kate Wagner
Fourth-year, political science
Campus tours coordinator
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Right-wing rights are not endangered
Alex Pherson’s “Zealotry is just not right” (April 28) is just another expression of the paranoia and victim complex that seems to define the Republican Party these days.
I find it amusing that the same Department of Homeland Security that the left decried as a possible tool of government repression is now the bogeyman of the right.
The DHS’ memo was intended to warn against the rise of “right-wing extremism” in response to the recession and political shake-ups in Washington.
Pherson takes this message as an attack on conservative agitators, but he seems to be confusing the term “right-wing extremist” with “conservative dissident.”
The right-wing extremists that the memo is warning against are the people who bomb abortion clinics and burn crosses, not the dissidents who parade around at tea parties for the benefit of television cameras.
Furthermore, Pherson seems to believe that the actions of left-wing extremists are characteristic of all liberal activists. Wrong.
Liberals do not approve of the violent methods of animal-rights activists any more than conservatives approve of the violent methods of the anti-government radicals who murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City.
The right’s rights are not going to be infringed upon any more than the left’s.
Just hear the words of Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano: “We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity, but we do not ““ nor will we ever ““ monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people.”
Thomas Kinzinger
Second-year, political science