With $25,000 in funding from a two-year college-completion grant, the Department of Residence Life at Texas A&M University (TAMU) created two social support groups for African-American and Hispanic students to increase their comfort and confidence in college.
In the two years since, the social support groups – AFAM and Aggie Familia – have served as a space for the historically underrepresented students to feel included on campus. Particularly, it affords the students an opportunity to ask the challenging questions around navigating their experiences as students of color.
“Our university is very big on the Aggie family, and that’s why AFAM and Aggie Familia seem to fit in,” said Dr. Carol D. Binzer, director of administrative and support services in the Department of Residence Life at Texas A&M. “You’re not differently an Aggie, but you can be a subset for the purposes of support.”
A little more than 3,000 Hispanic students and 500 African-American students live on Texas A&M’s campus. A majority of them are first-generation college students.
“As someone from the Rio Grande Valley, where Hispanics are the majority of the population, it was difficult becoming the minority overnight,” said Maria Villalpando, a TAMU student who had trouble connecting with other students of color on the expansive campus.
She said Aggie Familia helped facilitate connections between people of color and acted as “a support system that understands [minority students’] challenges that other people might not.” She reciprocated the support and helped others by giving them advice based on her own experience as a first-generation Hispanic woman at the school.
Similarly, Ricardo Pena, another TAMU student, said that he came to school believing he was well prepared on what to do and how to find resources after participating in a college readiness program.
