Ryan Chiao, Senior Photographer

Sixty-eight Yale College students recently completed their virtual training session for Matriculate, a community service organization dedicated to advising low-income, high-achieving high school students throughout the college application process.

Undergraduate students involved with Matriculate must complete the “live” training session — which focuses primarily on building skills relevant to mentoring high school students — to join the 2023 cohort of advising fellows. Matriculate, which has branches across the country, is housed at Yale within the Dwight Hall Center for Public Service and Social Justice. This year, the live training session was led by head advising fellows Lisbette Acosta ’24, Kayleigh Larsen ’23 and Wren Wolterbeek ’24. 

“We don’t focus on content so much as on really building skills in mentorship and advising high school students, so that really shapes what training looks like,” Larsen said. “[It’s] really about building a community and building advising skills.”

Prior to attending the training, Yale students interested in joining Matriculate submitted an application and participated in an interview with a member of the leadership team. When sorting through applications, leadership looked for an “understanding of the goal [of Matriculate],” according to Acosta. 

Wolterbeek added that they also sought specific traits that would make for a successful advising fellow, namely persistence and empathy.

“We emphasize that all skills are transferable,” Acosta said. “Students don’t necessarily have to come in with mentoring experience; that is something we support them with. As long as they have experience being empathetic and working one-on-one with someone in the past, I think that makes for a pretty good advising fellow as long as they are willing to learn.”

Last year, Acosta and Wolterbeek completed their own live training session, which was held in a similar virtual format. Feedback from that session was used to shape the structure for this year’s training. While the content remained relatively similar, the training itself was largely condensed. Students who completed training this year will also provide the current leadership with feedback for next year.

Following the live program, students completed virtual asynchronous training, which consisted of a series of webinars intended to further introduce them to the mission of Matriculate. 

Moving forward, advising fellows will need to complete and pass the advising skills evaluation, or ASE, before receiving certification and officially becoming advising fellows. The ASE consists of a 30-minute mock-advising scenario, after which advising fellows receive constructive feedback from an observing member of the leadership team. Advising fellows will spend the month of February preparing for the evaluation, and many fellows opt to take the ASE twice.

Advising fellows will subsequently be paired with their high school fellows in March and will then begin advising the high schoolers on the college applications process.

“I’m personally really excited for the relationship building that’s going to happen,” Wolterbeek said. “Especially based on the responses and the amount of empathy the new [advising fellows] have shown throughout training, I think they’re going to be able to implement that right off the bat.”

Matriculate was founded by Madeline Kerner ’07.