Rene Hernandez speaks about Success Amplified, the program at Baruch she has been the Assistant Director of since Spring of 2021, with a fluency that can only come from repetition and devotion. The Weissman DEI Alliance was treated to her impassioned pitch at their February meeting, heralding a new cross-college partnership as Baruch College’s many moving parts unite around the urgency of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the future of education.
Success Amplified is a program aimed at supporting students—particularly Baruch’s Black and Latinx population—with the resources they need not only to transition successfully into a college setting, but to thrive in that setting, persist towards graduation, and eventually claim the careers they desire. It began as a passion project shared by a handful of faculty and staff members sensitive to the needs of this growing population nearly a decade ago. It wasn’t until 2015 that they were able to launch a small cohort, offering students a three-day event. Now, only 8 years later, the program has grown into a full-fledged four-year experience, centering around cohorts, and mentoring around 300 hundred students college wide.
“In my many years working with Black and Brown students,” Hernandez reflected, “I see that there’s a tendency for them to think ‘I have to be independent, there’s just no way I can ask for help.’ These students are sometimes the first members of their families to pursue higher education, so there’s a lot of pressure on them to succeed without the tools they need necessarily built in. That’s really what this program is for, to fill in the gaps.”
Over the course of Success Amplified’s carefully scaffolded four-year program which aims to fuse academic success and student life to create a holistic college experience, students focus on everything from transitioning into college, avoiding procrastination, and cultivating study skills, to exploring their cultural wealth, avoiding impostor syndrome, and thinking seriously about their individual desires.
“I like to do this thing during their first summer with us,” explained Hernandez. “I have them write down: ‘What is it that everybody else wants you to be?’ Right? ‘What does your mom want you to be? What does your teacher want you to be? What do your friends want you to be? Like, who is this person? And then, after they write that down, I tell them to rip it up.” The students rip up these collective aspirations as Hernandez centers a different, perhaps more difficult question: “Who are you? What do you want to become?”
The ongoing success of the program’s methods are far from anecdotal. In a statistical analysis conducted last year which compared the trajectories of students who used the Success Amplified’s resources versus those that didn’t, the results were unambiguous. In 2020, 94% of Success Amplified students returned for their second year, compared to Baruch’s overall 79%, 87% of students returned in their third year compared to concerning 58% for Baruch as a whole.
When asked about her hopes for what this nascent partnership will lead to, Hernandez says she excited to start building a support system for Baruch students that is true to the diversity of the student body itself. “I love that the DEI Alliance is interested in supporting us because it shows how every school benefits from the success of these students. Every day I think that there must be more resources for this group of students. It is my hope that this partnership leads to those being unlocked.”
Cheryl Smith, Interim Associate Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and now Director of the Alliance, met Rene by chance at the Community Brown Bag Lunch break in October 2022. “I saw such great synergy between the work of Success Amplified and the Weissman DEI Alliance. Both are committed to building community, supporting a culture of inclusion, and ensuring equitable access to all the affordances of higher education,” she said. “Too often, student support units and faculty operate in separate silos. When we join forces, we can be better advocates for students and more impactful in all aspects of our work. I am excited to see what this partnership can build for students and the College, and I am committed to supporting it going forward”
There are some things I repeat over and over again,” says Hernandez. “One of them that never gets old is: college is not just going to class, it’s an experience. It’s up to us to make that experience just and equitable.”