Hello guys, gals, and nonbinary pals! Welcome back to my blog! For today’s post, I’m going to be talking about one of my favorite places on campus, the Class and Access Resource Center (CARC). The CARC is part of the Office of Identity and Cultural Resources, which is the office that manages all of the different resource centers on campus, which are the Women’s and Gender Center, the Queer Resource Center, the Multicultural Resource Center, the Center for International Student Engagement, and the Center for Religious and Spiritual Life. These centers are spaces dedicated to specific student populations on campus and offer a place to build community, as well as physical resources. They also hold different events that engage students in discussions about identity.
The CARC is the resource center that specializes in building a community for first-generation, low-income (FLI), veteran, and transfer students. Our programming and events center these identities and our goal is to make sure that these students have the support that they need to succeed at Amherst College. We also want to make sure that these students have a space to fully be themselves and talk to people who share similar identities.
When I was looking for jobs as a freshman, I knew that I wanted to find a job on campus where I was doing meaningful work that I cared about, so I applied to work at the resource centers. I chose to work at the CARC because I felt a strong connection to the FLI community, and I saw a lot of gaps in the support that FLI students were receiving on campus that I wanted to try to fill however I could.
Last semester, I worked on hosting a dinner in collaboration with the Center for International Student Engagement and the Queer Resource Center for students whose families couldn’t come to family weekend. We did different activities for people to get to know each other, and we had a really big turnout for the event. I was so nervous about planning it, but it ended up being really successful. I also worked on a speaker event with one of my professors where she talked about her work with the LA Tenants Union and Marxist ideas surrounding class! Currently, during this semester, I am working on a panel of FLI students who will talk about their study abroad experiences that way people have the opportunity to know more about what studying abroad is like and ask their peers questions. I am also working on a biweekly book club for FLI students where we talk about our experiences on campus while reading The Privileged Poor by Anthony Jack.
Working here has been such a great experience because I am able to build community and do work that actually makes a difference in people’s lives. I love getting to meet so many new people as a part of my job and getting to make my ideas a reality is something that is so cool to me. I am definitely the type of person who has lots of ideas about pretty much anything and everything but a lot of trouble executing those ideas. This job has taught me so much about how to make things happen and make those ideas real. I’m so grateful for the team that I work with and the community that we have here at Amherst. Every day I wake up and I know that there are other people who have similar experiences to me and that makes me feel so much less alone.