Summer Bridge Connections

For forty years, the CSP Summer Bridge Program has offered intensive academic preparation, individualized academic advising, and a personal connection for incoming first-year students from a variety of academic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Part of the summer programming is the Campus Connections initiative, which places Bridge student cohorts with various LSA units in a mini-mentorship arrangement that helps the students acclimate further to campus academic life.

This summer, the Center for Global and Intercultural Study (CGIS) welcomed a dozen of the Summer Bridge students into our Bridge to the World Leader program, designed specifically for Summer Bridge students by CGIS's senior intercultural program advisor Ebony Ellis and events and outreach coordinator Daniella Borum.

The main goal of the program was to give Bridge students an opportunity to engage the entire range of intercultural opportunities at UM and to begin considering international opportunities as part of their own academic planning. This summer's cohort spent a day each week in the CGIS office and also visited the International Center, the Ross Global Initiatives office, the International Programs in Engineering office, and the Stamps School of Art and Design's international engagement office.

The cohort worked with CGIS staff on basic tasks and began learning about the many programs CGIS offers by interacting with returned students. They developed presentations for a poster session about international education at UM. This contact with the professional field of international education got the students thinking about their own goals for studying abroad and about their own future in the field. CGIS will continue working with this cohort to help them develop further skills and ambitions for international education and for their careers as global leaders.