Students in the Carolina Millennial Scholars Program helped develop Tar Heel Preview Day in order to teach young males about higher education.
Marco Barker, director of the Carolina Millennial Scholars Program, said when the Carolina Millennial program began four years ago, schools and community organizations asked people from the program to visit their students and talk about education.
“We knew that we didn’t have the capacity to do that for schools across the area, and so we began thinking about how can we create an experience that does provide some exposure to students in a way that is cost effective and certainly efficient,” Barker said.
The one-day program specifically targets sixth through eighth graders, with a majority of the participants coming from Orange and Durham counties, said Michael John, spokesperson for the event. He said nearly 20 different schools were represented.
“The idea behind Tar Heel Preview Day is to engage middle-school males early on, to provide them with access and exposure and to allow them the opportunity to experience Carolina,” said Chief Diversity Officer Taffye Clayton. “We hope they see themselves as excited and thoughtful about how they can pursue higher education.”
Students worked with the School of Medicine to extract DNA from a strawberry and were introduced to the academic components of rapping by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
