Glimpse the future: Cal Poly's Upward Bound program gives underserved high schoolers a shot at attending college 

Surviving the college application process can be daunting, but an extra helping hand always makes it easier.

Take it from Upward Bound, the U.S. Department of Education-funded outreach program that's been offered by Cal Poly since 1981.

"All of the programs under this umbrella are meant to help underrepresented students," Cal Poly's Upward Bound Director Melissa Giddens said. "For us, they really just wanted to make sure underrepresented students were getting the support they needed to find higher education more attainable."

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• Photo Courtesy Of Cal Poly
• FIELD DAY High school students in Cal Poly's Upward Bound program get a preview of college life during the summer, including exploring downtown San Luis Obispo.

The umbrella Giddens is referring to is the Department of Education's Federal TRIO Programs. Upward Bound is one of the eight programs under TRIO that aims to help low-income individuals, first-generation college students, and individuals with disabilities to progress through the academic pipeline from middle school to postbaccalaureate programs.

Through TRIO, Cal Poly and other higher education institutions hosting any of the eight programs receive grant funding. Along with supplemental dollars from Cal Poly, the funding helps Giddens and her team travel to high schools in different parts of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties to meet underserved students.

Upward Bound is completely free for its students.

"We're not specifically recruiting our students to Cal Poly, even though we're hosting," she said. "We want to show them all their options—community college, private schools ... as well as majors and career paths. Then we also go over financial aid, help them actually complete applications, things like that."

Coupled with that help, in the summer, Upward Bound gives high schoolers a real-life peek into the daily motions of a college student. Forty of the program's 100 students stay in Cal Poly's residence halls for six weeks. They get roommates, can attend classes, and hang out at the dining halls.

"They do go home on the weekends. It's not completely scary for them, and they're not pulled away from their family for that long," Giddens said.

The summer classes offered are also a unique experience. Last year, Upward Bound offered a child development course along with a few foreign language classes. These classes are primarily taught by Cal Poly upperclassmen and graduate students.

"I think it really helps the students get invested in the subject when the teacher's really invested in the subject," Giddens said. "The teacher who taught French, her parents were French, so it was very easy to get those students passionate when we had teachers that were very involved in the subject and brought it to us."

Currently, Upward Bound is working with students in Nipomo, Pioneer Valley, Santa Maria, and Ernest Righetti high schools. Giddens added that some of these schools were already written into the Upward Bound grant when she joined the program in 2016. Schools are identified after looking into factors like poverty levels, the average education level of parents in the area, and the average GPA at each school.

While the majority of Upward Bound must comprise students from South SLO County and northern Santa Barbara County schools, students from other schools can also join the program.

"We are starting the school year at capacity," Giddens said. "We actually have a very lengthy waitlist. This is the first time I've seen it this full in my entire time working with the program."

High schoolers are eligible for Upward Bound if they either meet the income standards set by the federal government or if their parents do not have a four-year college degree. Upward Bound can accept students up to the first semester of their junior year, but ideally students start the summer between eighth and ninth grades.

Learn more and apply at upwardbound.calpoly.edu.

All students in the latest class of Upward Bound graduates are off to some form of college. Sixty-five percent of the seniors are going straight to four-year universities, and the remaining will attend Allan Hancock College. One student even received a full-ride scholarship through the QuestBridge program and will attend Brown University.

"Our students are just so awesome," Giddens said. "So, to be one little piece in their puzzle of figuring out ... their future is a pretty, pretty awesome job.

"Every year it's so exciting to see what this particular class is going to accomplish." Δ

Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at [email protected].