**Reminders: Please bring a notebook and pen to every session, and wear your CAC name badge at all times.**
Dear CAC family,
Welcome to our Adviser Forum East in New York City! We are thrilled to have you here in the Big Apple and are grateful to our host chapter, the awesome NYU Corps!
Our theme this year goes to the heart of CAC’s mission -- Advancing Opportunity. The goal over the next few days is to recommit ourselves to advancing opportunity in various ways. We hope you will discover best practices from your peers, engage with the research, reflect on your journey and what may lie ahead by interacting with the alumni panel and industry workshops, and be inspired by our guest speakers whose stories capture in powerful ways the journey to advancing opportunity.
On behalf of our national team and Board of Directors, we are grateful for the work that each of you — 716 advisers serving 210,000 students in 16 states across the country — do every day. We continue to build a national movement at a critical time in our nation’s history. Let us commit to ensuring every student hears those four key words, “I believe in you” and, together, we advance opportunity.
It is an honor to serve with you!
Yours, Nicole Hurd Founder and CEO College Advising Corps
Senior year of high school is a time of extreme uncertainty. The college-application process can be a source of anxiety and self-doubt; this is especially true for those students who are first-generation and low-income. Many students try to avoid the process altogether because they already experience negative self-worth when it comes to academics, the job market, and money. Meanwhile, those on the journey might develop an emotional and practical reliance on the adviser that becomes unhealthy for both parties. How can advisers help students build alternative sources of self-worth that lead to independence?
Join us as we discuss our experiences and examine a counseling theory that views positive regard for another person’s humanity as a right, not an earned status. You’ll be offered a set of counseling practices to help mitigate the ways in which the college-application process may undermine a student’s sense of worth. We’ll focus on developing a way of engaging students that gives them the tools to build confidence and self-actualize in uncharted territory, especially as first-generation college students and people of color.
