By Stevie LaBelle
The Adult College Experience Club is looking to reach out to Mount Wachusett Community College’s non-traditional student population. While this club started out as a program within the college, it has expanded into a means for seasoned non-traditional students to mentor incoming non-traditional students.
This club is for measure of helping to ease the anxiety of these students while entering into the college experience. Co-Advisors to the club are Melissa Sargent and Sarah Dorsey. While they hope that students will find the club fun and engaging, their overall goal is to be available to help.
They hope to be able to host workshops relevant to this population of students. These workshops would be offered at no cost to the students. Some topics that may be covered include: how to balance life and school, juggling methods for study when you have children, resume writing, etc. Additional topics would be decided by the members of club as to represent what is they feel is necessary to their experience and challenges undertaking college.
Since a great deal of non-traditional students have an inflexible and sometimes challenging schedule, the ACE Club has additional options to the standard club meetings. “Life happens,” explains Melissa Sargent, which they began looking into these alternate meeting options. The Club is going to launch a virtual meeting tool to its members.
“This variation in club meetings will allow students from not only the Gardner campus to participate, but the Leominster, Devens, and Web students as well,” Melissa Sargent explained. Not only will the meetings allow for students who have a web camera and microphone to actively participate, the meetings will be recorded so that students who could not watch at the scheduled time, can view at their own availability. The club will encourage its members to participate in the discussion via Facebook as well.
With “National Non-traditional Students Week” coming up, November 7th – 11th, the ACE Club is recruiting new members as they currently do not have their Officer positions filled. There first meeting will be held in the North Café at the Gardner campus on November 17th at 5pm. This meeting will be launching the new technology for a virtual meeting. Sargent encourages students who are available to come to campus for the meeting to do so, as it will not be solely a virtual experience.
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