Eleven freshmen who were selected to attend Penn as a “posse” from urban Miami high schools engaged their campus community at a retreat this weekend.
The Posse Plus retreat aimed to foster a dialogue between the Posse Foundation — a nationwide college admittance and leadership training organization — and other groups on campus.
The retreat was hosted through Penn for the first time. The University began partnering with Posse in 2009 and welcomed its first group of Posse Scholars this year.
The Posse Foundation, founded in 1989 to recruit and train socio-economically diverse students from public, urban high schools, hosts similar retreats on its 39 affiliate college campuses each year.
The weekend-long retreat at Lafayette Hill, Pa., was centered around “the Millennial generation.” Many discussions surrounded social issues that concern young people born after 1980.
At the retreat, students filled out surveys on topics such as “How many friends do you have on Facebook?” and “Who are the top three people that represent your generation?” Wharton freshman and Posse Scholar Catalina Arango said.
Results of the survey will be aggregated and put into a report to reflect current attitudes toward issues such as hook-up cultures on campus and the use of social media.
The remainder of the retreat allowed those who attended “to be reflective on what type of world we’re inheriting,” Ara added.
“The retreats are a unique way to engage members of a campus community” in critical dialogue, Posse Foundation President Deborah Bial wrote in an e-mail. She added that the Posse Foundation was “thrilled to have the opportunity to facilitate this discussion at Penn.”
The discussion is designed to “gather people from different cross sections around campus” in order to foster community, said Posse Miami Program Director George Okrah, adding that the hope is to “bring the dialogue back to campus and create an avenue for discussion that normally wouldn’t happen.”
At Penn, the dialogue will definitely be continuing after the retreat — in the form of a new student-based discussion forum.
Arango said that while she and her friends from the retreat have already “continued some of these conversations about being more active in the community,” she felt that “there aren’t enough of these in-depth conversations on campus.”
“The Posse Scholars on campus are planning to start a club in which these conversations can flow,” she added.
“It would be a challenge to recreate the conversation here,” said College sophomore Wesley Skold, who attended the retreat despite being unfamiliar with Posse beforehand. “The facilitators brought so much energy and it was structured so well.”
However, he said that continuing the dialogue that began at the retreat is “a worthwhile challenge. If they were to bring this conversation back,” he added, “it would be beneficial for everyone to be much more action-oriented as opposed to just discussion-oriented.”
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