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A helping hand for rural college students | Editor For A Day [1]

['Brynna Garcia']

Date: 2025-02-12

For any student, the thought of college can be scary. It is a life-changing experience.

That is why, for a rural student, it can be even more of a daunting thought. It’s hard to leave family, friends, and familiarity. As a rural student, our small towns, whether we want to admit it or not, are comforting. They are our security blanket. The place where we know everyone and everyone knows us.

This is why creating a rural student-serving university is key to helping more rural students attend college.

At California State University Chico, we are lucky that our campus is a rural student-serving institution that welcomes students that come from its surrounding counties. Over the past three years, we have formed a group called the North State Student Ambassadors. We are a group of rural students from the Chico State Service region including Lassen, Plumas, Colusa, Siskiyou, Shasta, and Tehama.

The Ambassadors work within the surrounding counties to help make rural student voices heard and create a space for the rural students on campus. By hosting events for students to connect with each other, we do our part in helping alleviate the stress rural students feel when stepping onto a campus they now call home. We also do research on rural areas in hopes that we can shed more light on rural students’ journeys and their challenges in education.

We hope to create a road map that other universities, especially those in urban areas, can follow and create their own rural student group that can help in the transition from small, rural town to big city, college campus. We have done a lot of good work within our own college campus and using our own experiences as rural students, but now we are taking it to the next level.

We are excited to be hosting the first annual “Rural Student Voice” conference on March 7. We will have students from all over the North State in attendance, along with some special guests including a representative from Rural Schools Collaborative, North State Together, and Chico State President Stephen Perez.

This conference will give students the opportunity to have their voices heard and to learn about rural student education in a fun, interactive environment. Our team is excited to hear from the students, including what they feel their challenges are in coming from a rural area but also how they think it has helped them. The students will get to visit the Chico State campus, eat from the on-campus dining options, meet the president of the university, and connect with each other. It is an opportunity to go from rivals to resources.

Many rural students choose to not attend college. This can be for various reasons, such as financial instability, lack of knowledge about options or resources, lack of support, accessibility, and fear of moving away from their support system. Although we may not be able to help with all of these reasons, our goal is to help eliminate the fear around higher education and create a support system for rural students within their campus community.

Brynna Garcia is media manager for North State Student Ambassadors. She can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].

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[1] Url: https://www.chicoer.com/2025/02/12/a-helping-hand-for-rural-college-students-editor-for-a-day/

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