Scholarship Essay Excerpt – Arielle Bivas

Community: When I first started at UCLA, I decided to become a mentor through the UCLA branch of a national community service organization called WYSE (Women and Youth Supporting Each other). WYSE is a mentorship program which started at UCLA in 1995 and subsequently spread to 12 campuses across the country. Our mission is to give girls of all colors and ages the confidence, knowledge and resources to make educated decisions about their lives and their futures. We mentor girls that attend a middle school that has been targeted for its low socio-economic status and its relationship to a nearby high school with a high teenage pregnancy rate. We are curriculum based and conduct weekly sessions at the middle school campus, which consist of fun activities and open discussions on topics such as racism, sexism, healthy relationships, body image, the politics of motherhood, future options and broader women’s issues.

In addition to planning and facilitating these weekly group sessions, I have developed yearlong one-on-one relationships with one or two mentees each year, in which we have conversed on the telephone, kept journals together, and gone on field trips. Through the course of my first year of mentoring, it became clear that WYSE would be the passion of my college life. My involvement and interest in WYSE grew and in my second year I took on a director’s position of the UCLA branch. I’ve continued as a director this year and taken a larger role in restructuring our branch. Besides my commitment to being a mentor, role-model and friend, as a director of our branch I have worked on strengthening UCLA WYSE as an organization. I have improved our program to give the mentors a more active role, increase their passion and involvement, and make them aware of the broader context of their participation in WYSE. In making UCLA WYSE more organized and increasingly participatory, a greater number of college women can have the incredible experience that I’ve had of being a WYSE mentor which will in turn, give more adolescent girls the opportunity to have an understanding, supportive face to look to.

I plan to further my work with WYSE at the national level by interning at our national resource office in the summer and coming year. I hope to continue with WYSE for the rest of my time in college and contributing to the organization even after my graduation.