Marvens Pierre

CESL Program: Student Bridges  Civic Engagement & Public Service Certificate

Major: Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) and Anthropology

Around my senior year of high school, I started developing more awareness of issues within certain communities around the U.S. and globally as well - issues around race and class, sexuality, gender, all sorts of things.  Then when I got to UMass, I first started tackling and learning about these issues when I took the service-learning class that is directly affiliated with Student Bridges: SERVICE LEARNING 293, Learning Through Community Engagement.  When I took that class I was amazed.  It was my favorite class that I took my freshman year, despite the fact that I was an Engineering major.  That course definitely got me thinking more deeply and more theoretically on how our society functions globally. Discovering and unraveling that reality was a huge wake up call for me.  I was just blown away by the things that people go through each and every day and the intersectionality between people’s social identities and what it means and how it impacts them on a day-to-day basis. 

Community engagement definitely gets me to actually delve in deeper and explore what’s the root of these problems, how can we go in and try to alleviate these problems and what can we do as a collective and as a group to move forward. I definitely wanted to explore that aspect, which is also what inspired me to change to a double major in STPEC and Anthropology.  I felt that inside my own spirit and my own soul that I wanted to make more of a positive impact directly with people who do face pretty hard stuff on a day-to-day basis. 

For me, identifying as a lower middle class black male, I also come from a predominantly white neighborhood.  I lived next to a huge city, Brockton, MA, that is predominantly people of color, lower class or middle class.  Being able to see the clashes between different socioeconomic environments, different groups of people, first-hand, that’s also what got me to think more about these issues and wanting to go into this type of work.  I’ve seen my close peers face discrimination or go through discrimination based on socioeconomic status, which got me thinking about what careers can I actually go into and tackle these issues. Now I plan to pursue a Masters degree in Public Policy and probably a dual degree in Business Administration as well. 

Student Bridges’ mission is to provide access and success to underrepresented students on campus and beyond.  We work with students on campus and we also have sites in high schools and middle schools.  Our main focus is the educational aspect within these larger socioeconomic issues, providing the resources and tools for students so they can gain access to educational opportunities and then helping them, once they have the access, to have success in whatever they’re trying to pursue. 

We work with a big range of students.  We work with college students, freshman and also older college students, helping people with realizing, “Where do you want to go, or where do you hope to see yourself?”  The mission is to try to eliminate the doubt that comes with trying to figure out, “What’s my purpose in life, what am I supposed to be doing?”  That’s a huge problem in students who are underrepresented who don’t get all the resources and access to tools for what they need to help them figure that out.  Because that’s a huge part of your life:  What is my purpose?  What am I destined for? 

And then we work in high schools and middle schools with underrepresented students on that end. It’s one thing to tutor someone and lie out the facts and then go about your day.  But to be a tutor-mentor, it takes that a step further.  It opens up to creating a relationship and a bond with these students.  If it’s just like a simple professional one-on-one, all right, I’m just going to teach you this and then that’s it, you can do whatever with that.  Creating that relationship, that one-on-one, that personal connection between you and that student actually gives them more of a drive to actually do what they need to do, or do what they want to do. Realizing that I myself can make an impact like that was very life changing. 

Engagement with others may seem like not a big deal, but it is.  Community engagement, actually being able to work with people on a one-on-one basis, is a very important aspect of life.  When I first got to UMass, I was very unsure where I wanted to go.  Every college freshman comes in, you know, we don’t know what we want to do.  Sometimes we think we know what we want to do, but then we discover things like Student Bridges or CESL, and then we get to realize what we want to focus on and what we want to actually do for a living and what we can do for the rest of our lives, ultimately. So, it’s important to actually give that a chance. 

To take a step and be like, “What’s going on around me?” Because you may be in your own little bubble, but to actually step out of that bubble and see what’s going on in the real world, it’s very important.  For me, I don’t regret making that choice of working with civic engagement and service-learning programs, because I do believe that it was a powerful and life changing choice that I made.