Name: Kristine Carter
Year: Class of 2012
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
Major: Civil Engineering
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Extracurricular activities—some do it to fill up resumes, or to help them get into grad school. I do them because they make life so much more fun and exciting! Wikipedia states that “On average, in the United States, many students participate in a minimum of one extracurricular activity throughout the course of one school year.” But that’s unacceptable for me, because I’m not average. I’ve always known that. I mean what eleven year old says they want to be a civil engineer (random right?!) My friends always say that I have more clubs than classes. Many of my activities range from committees, advisory boards, volunteer groups, dance, and multicultural student groups. Spreading multicultural awareness on campus is close to my heart, so I’ll tell you about 2 of them that were created to assist multicultural students—SSS and MAPP.
The story of me getting becoming involved in SSS and MAPP began the summer before I officially stepped foot onto campus as a freshman. That summer I received a letter asking if I wanted to sign up for two multicultural student groups, Mentoring Assistance Peer Program (known on campus as MAPP) and Student Success Series (SSS), that were intended to help me, as a minority student, have a better transition to Hopkins. Optimistically I replied that I would join both organizations because they sounded fun—and without a doubt, they were.
For SSS, we moved onto campus a few days earlier than everyone else did, then we attended a retreat where we learned about study techniques, what some typical days in the life of Hopkins students were like, and of course what college retreat would be complete without icebreakers? Soon after our retreat, the first week of freshman year began, and thanks to SSS I had already formed relationships with many other multicultural students, who were also in many of my classes as well.
By the second week of classes when I got an email inviting me to a MAPP barbecue, I’d almost forgotten I was in that club too. So what is MAPP? It’s a program aimed at giving incoming multicultural freshmen a mentor for one on one support during the usually tumultuous freshman year. Incoming freshmen sign up for the program and are assigned to a MAPP mentor based on personal interest as well as major. Each mentor is assigned about 5 freshmen, and a group of about 4 mentors and their mentees create what we call a MAPP family. So, I arrived and was introduced to my MAPP mentor, Ryan. And we sat in our MAPP families and got to know each other a bit better. We later had a “family event” where we baked cookies and played charades, our most memorable night of the year. And other MAPP events like freshmen study sessions, trips to Arundel Mills Mall, Laser tag, field day, Relay for Life and MAPP spring formal made my freshmen truly unforgettable. Not to mention I met a lot of my close friends from MAPP.
And by my spring semester I knew that I wanted to make someone else’s freshmen year just as fun and unforgettable. So I applied to be become a MAPP mentor, and after many interview processes and training sessions I’m pleased to say that I became one! And this year MAPP is even better than before with new
So if you are ever sitting at home one day and an opportunity comes your way to do something, that maybe you didn’t think you were interested in, you never know, it could be the experience of a lifetime…so try it! My interest in promoting multicultural and ethnic diversity and awareness led me to join these two groups, and I haven’t looked back since!
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