For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Juvenile Urban Multicultural Program (JUMP Nation) held its JUMP Weekend in person, bringing middle school and high school students up from New York City for an educational experience at Binghamton University.

JUMP Nation pairs young students, called proteges, with current BU students, called mentors, who help guide the students through certain choices and obstacles involving higher education. The program was founded in 1991 by BU students, with the mission to decrease high school dropout rates and increase enrollment in higher education institutions, especially for at-risk students in urban areas. Proteges this year were chosen by school counselors, who recommended students they thought would benefit most from the program.

This year’s JUMP Weekend began on Friday and continued into Saturday evening. It involved a variety of events for the mentors and proteges, including scavenger hunts around campus, Among Us game sessions and two truths and a lie, along with a dance workshop and a college admissions workshop.

Ashley Martinez, president of JUMP and senior majoring in economics, said the program brings benefits to many proteges who come from low-income areas and have no other resources available to them, helping them achieve their goals and dreams.

“All the students that come up here that are at-risk, are actually at-risk,” Martinez said. “They don’t have any resources, they have family problems back at home, they are going through things that we don’t know about and they need help.”

Martinez discussed how significant the mentors’ guidance can potentially be for the young students and their communities.

“I think it’s very important for our communities back at home to see people who look like us, [Black, Indigenous and people of color and Latinx people] in college,” Martinez said. “We need to have these proteges know that they are able to do whatever they plan on doing with their life, and know that we’re there to support them.”

In order to foster more personalized relationships between mentors and proteges, proteges were housed with their mentors on campus. Mentors agree to a commitment with their proteges, guiding them from eighth grade to potentially their freshman year of college. For many of the proteges, the event was their first time on a college campus and their first time learning about higher education opportunities available to them.

One of the speakers at the JUMP college admission workshop, Arianna Mendoza, an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) counselor and second-year graduate student pursuing a Master of Social Work, spoke about the importance of involving current BU students in mentoring the students.

“If we aren’t giving mentors an opportunity to share their experience of how they got here and how they did it with these young students, then no one will,” Mendoza said. “These mentors give these kids the actual college experience and show them how they get through. If we get more mentors, we can get more kids up here.”

Mendoza said she still keeps in touch with her proteges from when she was a mentor in JUMP Weekend and takes pride in their success after the program.

“I made sure I gave whatever I could give,” Mendoza said. “One of my proteges is actually going into college. So it shows that I made a difference and I did what I could do to help them out.”

At the college admission workshop, Mendoza presented the list of opportunities and programs that BU and the state has available to assist with college and higher education — as many of the proteges would be first-generation students.

Martinez discussed why she thinks JUMP is critical in improving the experiences of first-generation students.

“We hold JUMP Weekend to expose students to these social and educational forums,” Martinez said. “A lot of people, and me personally, are first-generation students, so they don’t have that guidance or resources, so we have to bridge that gap.”