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One of Brooklyn College's Largest SEEK Classes Kicks off Its College Career with Pre-Freshman Summer Orientation Session

7/14/2009

One of the largest groups of incoming freshmen in the history of the Brooklyn College SEEK program crowded into the Gold Room of the Student Center on Monday, June 29, for the opening session of their pre-freshman summer semester.

The class of 230 students, along with counselors and graduate student advisers, overflowed the large conference room and had to be broken up into two back-to-back sessions.

Professor Martha Bell, SEEK Department chairperson and director, told the crowd, "You’re officially college students today. Give yourself a big hand!"

Bell informed this year’s entering students they had big shoes to fill. The 160 SEEK students who graduated in May and joined about 200,000 graduates of the program statewide, Bell said, were "the most successful class" in the history of the program. The SEEK Class of 2009 boasted not only the most graduates but also the highest number of honor students, the most places won at graduate schools and the highest grades in the program’s history, she said.

"You will have to do your very, very best," Bell told them. "You’ll have to get A’s and B’s."

Established by state law in 1966 as a result of the civil rights struggle, SEEK (Search for Education Elevation and Knowledge) is a higher education opportunity program that operates at all 11 senior colleges in the CUNY system. "Now most of our students are first-generation students and come from low-income backgrounds," said Bell. "No one in their family ever went to college before them."

SEEK aims to provide students a network of educational and financial support, Bell said. She likened the pre-freshman program to an "academic boot camp."
"The program is four weeks long—from June 29 to July 23—and is designed to teach them how to be college students," she explained. "We give them their first core course, teach them how to read critically and how to evaluate their own writing, and, if necessary, give them enough math to allow them to keep up."

In September these new freshmen will join the rest of the SEEK program’s students, who now number 830 in all, and for the next four years will attend classes along with the rest of the Brooklyn College student body. "There are about a dozen tenured professors and roughly 20 adjuncts to help them along," Bell said. "It’s hard work, but you can do it."