The 350 UCSD alums and students who filed into dinner in the Price
Center Ballroom on May 26, were there to celebrate a program that
had transformed many of their lives—UCSD’s “Summer
Bridge.”
 Started
in 1977 by the Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services
(OASIS), Summer Bridge is designed to help students from
high schools that historically have not sent large numbers to UCSD,
and diversity and academic and financial need are some of the primary
factors that are used to choose the attendees. According to OASIS’s
most recent statistics (2005), the 150 students who accept their
invitations to Summer Bridge had higher GPAs and were more likely
to finish their first year than students who declined. It was statistics
like these, in fact, that earned Summer Bridge a Noel-Levitz Retention
Excellence Award in 2003.
 Every summer, freshmen students live on campus for four weeks,
take two intense, four-credit courses—one on contemporary
issues and one on science—and learn about UCSD’s various
academic resources.
“Many of the incoming students think they’re in it
all by themselves. But we try to demystify that idea,” says
Patrick Velásquez, Ph.D., the director of OASIS. “We
teach them to use the resources around them.”
 The sense of solidarity that the Summer Bridge students experience
during the program is often long lasting and they frequently return
to OASIS to work as mentors and tutors. And judging by the clamorous
applause of the program’s 350 alumni attending the reunion,
many of its participants pinpoint Summer Bridge as a watershed
in their educations.
“For me, Summer Bridge cultivated confidence in my intellectual
ability,” says Stephanie Akpa, ’06, who just finished
her first year in law school at Yale. Moneek Bhatia, ’05,
says she was aiming for a career in finance when she first started
at UCSD but that after her experience at Summer Bridge and OASIS
as both a student and counselor, she shifted her ambitions.
“I decided that I wanted to work around issues of social
justice and recruitment and retention of students of color in higher
education,” she says. In fact, she just graduated with a
masters in higher education at Harvard. “I don’t know
that I would have been this successful if it wasn’t for Summer
Bridge,” she adds.
— Courtney Baird
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