After last year’s popularity, the Latino Educational Advancement Program, or LEAP, is expanding.
Sponsored by Multicultural and Diversity Affairs, LEAP aims to support first-year Hispanic and Latino students through workshops and by pairing them with undergraduate and graduate student mentors.
LEAP’s first five-week program ran in Spring with 17 students enrolled and 10 mentors. LEAP’s second class is projected to have 35 students and 24 mentors. Instead of being five weeks long, it’s expanding to the full semester. A kickoff event for the program will be at the Hispanic-Latino Affairs office in the Reitz Union on Wednesday at 6 p.m.
Although LEAP targets Hispanic and Latino students, any first-year student at UF is able to register for the program, said Jessica Valdes, LEAP’s assistant coordinator of external affairs. Registration closes on Sept. 1.
The workshops aim to inform participating students about the resources and individuals available to help them during their time at UF.
“By giving them all these resources and creating a network with their peers, along with different faculty and staff, this will create a cohort of support to get them to graduation,” said Gabe Lara, the director of Hispanic-Latino Affairs.
Karina Vado, one of LEAP’s three coordinators, wrote in an email that, as a first-generation Latina student, she didn’t have resources available to help her when she first entered higher education. Vado, a third-year UF English doctoral student, said a program like LEAP would have helped her get acquainted with the university quicker.
“Broadly speaking, I want, as the coordinator, for our LEAP scholars to not only academically succeed, but also feel as though they have a home away from home,” she said.
LEAP also aims to improve the retention rates of Hispanic and Latino students at UF. The university’s retention rate for students of all ethnicities was 96 percent in Fall 2016, said UF spokesperson Steve Orlando.
Orlando said the university does not track retention rates by specific ethnicity.
According to a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 15 percent of Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. attained a four-year degree or higher.
In addition to creating networks for student success, Lara believes LEAP will support his goal of making UF a Hispanic-serving institution, where the university would have at least 25 percent of its students identifying as Hispanic or Latino. Out of UF’s population, 17.39 percent of students identified as Hispanic or Latino in Fall 2016, Orlando said.
“This program would be a great way to move toward that goal,” Lara said.
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