Dillen Peace, a 20-year-old from a Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona, said he wouldn’t be forging his path at Dartmouth College without the support of a University of Colorado program designed to prepare American Indian students for college.
“It’s the challenge that a lot of native youth need in just exposure to something we can work toward,” Peace said. “That’s what I felt like I didn’t have in my community. There’s talk about college, but not to the degree of what this program offered.”
The CU Upward Bound program welcomes around 100 American Indian high school students from eight reservations across the country to campus for six- week summer sessions.
The program, which caters to low-income and first-generation college students, can begin as early as a student’s freshman year of high school, and students are invited back summer after summer to take classes, bond and get academic support. CU Upward Bound has a retention rate above 90 percent for returning high school students, according to CU officials.
The Federal Trio program also remains a resource after students graduate from high school.
Peace found out about the camp through his older brother, applied and was accepted for the summer of 2012.
Coming from a tight-knit community in Rock Point, Ariz., Peace said the sprawling Boulder campus, rigorous classes and peers who became family opened his eyes to the vast opportunities available to him after high school graduation.
But it was a more personal epiphany the camp inspired that he said benefited him the most.
Read the full story
