VCU news

By Brian McNeill

A few years back, Chris Lopez Herrera enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University, but things didn’t go as planned.

“I was struggling and going through a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t as good of a student as I knew I could be.”

Lopez Herrera decided to leave VCU and enroll at Brightpoint Community College. He knew he wanted to eventually return to VCU, so he joined the Mellon Pathways Program, a partnership between Brightpoint, Reynolds Community College and VCU that supports and guides students as they transfer from the community colleges to VCU.

At Brightpoint, the Pathways program provided him with enhanced advising about course selection and academic majors, as well as support for transfer logistics, financial aid and career exploration opportunities. Introduced at the community college level, the program provides students with a solid foundation from which they can successfully study the arts and humanities at VCU.

Lopez Herrera earned his associate degree at Brightpoint and returned to VCU this fall. A junior majoring in psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences, he wants to pursue a career in mental health – and credits the Pathways program for helping him get on track to succeed at VCU.

“I’m feeling much more optimistic going into VCU this second time,” he said. “I know I have people that I can rely on and get to see and hang out with on a regular basis.”

Lopez Herrera is one of roughly 60 students currently at VCU who transferred through the Pathways program. Approximately 200 students are currently in the program at Brightpoint and Reynolds.

“At the community colleges and at VCU, it’s very difficult for transfer students to find their place,” said Janelle Marshall, director of the Pathways program and a faculty member at Brightpoint. “And so we help to create that place for them so that once they transfer, they have a community already here.”

Many of VCU’s Pathway students gathered in the STEM Building recently for a monthly “Dinner’s on Us” event. While they ate fare from Sticks Kebob Shop, they heard presentations about paid research opportunities.

Marshall told them about the Mellon Research Fellows program, which pairs motivated second-year Pathways students with faculty members for enhanced mentoring, advising and research projects.

And they heard about student research opportunities through a variety of labs that are part of the Humanities Research Center at VCU. Chris Cynn, Ph.D., director of the Health Humanities Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies in the College of Humanities and Sciences, and Micah White, a doctoral student, research fellow in the lab and alum of VCU and the Pathways program, told them about initiatives such as the lab’s oral history project and memorialization efforts in support of the East Marshall Street Well Project.

Previous monthly “Dinner’s on Us” events in the fall semester have featured guest speakers from VCU Libraries, VCU’s Writing Center and more.

Peter Henry, Ph.D., assistant director of the Pathways program, said one of its key elements is that the community college students have dual enrollment in both Brightpoint or Reynolds and VCU, enabling them to take VCU courses toward their major and have access to VCU activities, events and resources before they transfer.

“I like to think of it as kind of a pipeline,” Henry said. “It is a way to really smooth out that process as much as possible. While they are dually admitted, they are able to have a lot of the benefits of being both a VCU student and a community college student at the same time.”

Plus, he said, the Pathways program provides students like Lopez Herrera with a cohort of peers who came through the program at the community colleges and now attend VCU.

“They have known each other for several years, maybe through all of these activities and programming that we’ve provided pre-transfer,” Henry said. “And part of the goal is to give our students a chance to actually see each other in real life. They may not be in the same classes with each other, but they know each other and can meet with each other.”

That supportive network of fellow students has been the best part of the Pathways program for Lopez Herrera.

“It offered me a community,” he said. “They’re people I can rely on and give me reassurance whenever I’m feeling insecure or stressed out about my schoolwork.”