Fresh out of high school, starting a college career is hard. Students know that going in, but actually experiencing the challenge is another story.
This year was the first time Knox College offered a program called SPARK, or Student Preparation and Readiness for Knox.
History professor and SPARK Academic Co-Director Catherine Denial tells WGIL the program is designed to help students get a leg up on starting college.
“We took 32 student and those students came from a variety of different backgrounds,” Denial says. “One thing that many of them had in common was that they were first generation. Not all of them, but many of them. And so we really sort of came at this program to meet them where they were academically and culturally.”
The program, which is also a half-credit course, ran from the last week of August through the first week of September, right before classes started.
Curriculum included intensive writing, reading and math each day and sessions that had students meet faculty members in a scavenger hunt style activity, visits to a community garden and to the Knox Biological Field Station, Green Oaks.
Denial says moving forward, she would like to expand the number of students allowed into the program for the start of the next academic school year.