MSU freshmen give a little back with
mentoring gigs e-mail print

By AMY L. KOVAC
HERALD NEWS

MONTCLAIR - Between going to class, completing homework assignments and adapting to life after high school, college freshmen have many demands on their time. Some students take on more than just the basics.

They might join a fraternity or sorority or a sports team or student government.

Manisha Asawla and Johnathan Gaugler, freshmen at Montclair State University, spend several hours every week doing community service.

Asawla tutors elementary school students after school on Tuesdays, helping them with homework and reading. Gaugler spends his Wednesday afternoons mentoring middle school students.

And both participate in various other service projects through the Human Relations and Leadership Development Association, a campus group with about 40 members.

"It helps me notice that there are a lot of things needed," Gaugler said. "It makes me feel good that I've done something that someone else appreciates, and that motivates me to do more projects."

Asawla, 19, and Gaugler, 18, are the first in their families to attend college, like 50 percent of the students at Montclair State University. The Herald News is following the pair throughout their freshman year. As part of the Educational Opportunity Program, a statewide program that serves disadvantaged students, Asawla and Gaugler elected to be in the Emerging Leaders Program on campus.

Through this program, they take an introductory psychology class called Emerging Leadership: Theory and Application.

One of the course's requirements is that students participate in a service project that will give them practical knowledge of the theories they learn in class - an approach known as service learning. Students in the class choose their project from four different areas - literacy, mentoring, digital divide and environmental issues. Asawla, who volunteered at the public library in high school, chose the literacy project because she wanted to work with young children.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Asawla arrived at the Rand Elementary School in Montclair for her weekly tutoring sessions with the children in the STARS program. Asawla's three charges - 8-year-old boys with lots of energy - needed help with their homework, and Asawla had to transition between helping one with measuring the diameter of several objects and helping another parse compound words.

After a break, Asawla pulled out "The Littles," a book her students had been reading. Asawla's group picked up at Chapter 4, and she asked each boy to read a page aloud. The last student balked when it was his turn.

"You don't want to read?" Asawla asked. "I'll help you with the words."

With tears in his eyes, Shakiel Jones shook his head. Asawla instructed the other two boys to read on their own and turned her attention to helping Jones with vocabulary words used in the text.

"I really enjoy working with kids," she said later. "But this is my first time tutoring. I don't have that much experience with it, but I'm learning how to handle kids. It's not easy."

For Asawla, who commutes to college via bus, getting to and from these projects can be difficult. Carving out the time for this weekly project and the other projects she does is challenging. To better manage her time, she uses a planner to write down all her appointments.

"There are so many things going on," she said. "It's just too much."

Gaugler also did community service before coming to MSU, as a peer mediator in elementary and high school, and chose the mentoring project because he knows first-hand the positive impact of mentoring.

"I think I made the right choice," he said. "I learn things from my mentors, and now I'm mentoring others."

In high school, Gaugler found mentors in his coaches. His wrestling coach, Raul Guzman, was instrumental in getting Gaugler off the wait list and into MSU. By mentoring others, Gaugler feels he's giving back.

"We show them how to do things, so they can learn and then show others as a role model. It's a continuous chain," he said.

Each Wednesday, Gaugler meets with seventh- and eighth-graders from Glenfield Middle School in Montclair for a couple of hours. Recently they attended a workshop on bullying, where the presenter asked them to give examples of words that are used to bully people. The middle-school students took great delight in using words they would normally be punished for saying.

Gaugler's student, a seventh-grader who goes by the nickname "Paco," is a miniature version of Gaugler, thin with light brown skin and a head of curly brown hair. He is popular and a little mischievous - something Gaugler said he can relate to.

But like Asawla, scheduling these projects has been hard, especially since Gaugler recently signed up for MSU's wrestling team. Practice is 4 to 6 p.m. daily. And he recently got in a car accident. He survived unscathed, but his car is inoperable. It is now more difficult for him to get to school, his projects and practice because he depends on his older brother for transportation.

To help students like Gaugler and Asawla maintain their studies while doing these projects, the Educational Opportunity Program assigns them a counselor with whom they must meet every month.

During these check-in sessions, counselors will ask about five main areas: personal, academic, financial, career and other issues with university life.

"We do let the freshmen know if they are floundering, they should let us know," said Beth Diggs, associate director of MSU's Educational Opportunity Programs and director of the Human Relations and Leadership Development Institute. Diggs also helped create the psychology course that Asawla and Gaugler take.

She stressed that the service-learning component to the psychology class and the community service that students do through the Human Relations and Leadership Development Association, helps strengthen the concepts of leadership. Service also allows students who receive state funding to go to college through the Educational Opportunity Fund give back to the community.

Valerie Sessa, one of the professors who teaches the psychology class, said these types of activities make students more self-aware. The reflective papers that she assigns each week require students to write about how they can use their leadership skills effectively in their service.

"We didn't want to just give them leadership training," Diggs said. "We wanted them to see how they could take that out to the real world."

Reach Amy L. Kovac at (973) 569-7153 or kovac@northjersey.com.