Strengthen UNC’s ties with the state

After my last column ran, I got an email from Nicholas Didow, a professor at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He invited me along to shadow a class of second-year MBA students he was working with who would be traveling down to Eastern North Carolina.

Didow and his students were providing consulting services to an entrepreneur network looking to get off the ground and a dental clinic targeted toward underserved populations in the area.

So, like any good student, I decided to cut class and spend two days in Rocky Mount.

In case you were wondering, yes, a pack of MBA students wandering around downtown Rocky Mount sticks out. A lot.

When we walked down Main Street, doors would open and business owners would invite us inside, eager to talk to visitors from UNC.

I ended up in a furniture store with some other stragglers talking to the owner. As soon as we told him we were from UNC, he smiled.

It was clear that this man, and everyone else we encountered in Rocky Mount, respected the University deeply. But what was also clear was that not all of them felt a connection to our school.

This connection was on my mind when I sat down with Stephen Farmer, the vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions to talk about what the Office of Undergraduate Admissions does to ensure that they reach out to students in rural areas across the entire state of North Carolina.

It’s a tall order, but something admissions works hard to fulfill, dedicating resources to participate in college fairs and panels all across the state.

Despite this outreach, Farmer said the low numbers of UNC students from rural areas are a reflection of low application rates from these places. So why aren’t these students applying? Could this be a larger expression of a lack of connection rural areas feel to UNC?

This lack of connection isn’t the admissions office’s problem. This is a problem we all need to admit, and a problem we all need to take steps to fix.

The sort of outreach the class of MBAs I shadowed is doing is how we can start fostering a stronger connection between our campus and our state.

Like any relationship, UNC’s relationship to the state of North Carolina needs to be reciprocal. North Carolina provides us with funding, students, professors and thousands of rabid basketball fans. In turn, UNC must use its intellectual capital, resources and institutional structures to improve the lot of the state.

Getting our hands dirty doing work in communities throughout North Carolina is how we prove to outside stakeholders that we have a genuine interest in the future of the state, and how we prove to prospective students that Chapel Hill is more than the stereotypes they may have heard.

We, especially us undergraduates, need to facilitate this connection. About 82 percent of us are from North Carolina and the rest of us have chosen to spend at least four years of our life in this state.

We need to utilize all that UNC has to offer as well as our own talents to the best of our ability to improve our state. Otherwise we stay in a bubble that doesn’t do either us or our state any good.