Conéctate Early Move-In Program

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Conéctate Early Move in Program

Conéctate is an early move-in program designed for first-year freshmen & transfer Latinx students to experience the fast-paced campus life that awaits at Illinois. This year, 2022, Conectate will be in person from August 16-18, 2022. 

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Why Conéctate?

This three-day program will provide incoming First-Year and Transfer Latinx College Students in a predominately white institution (PWI) the opportunity to explore their Latinidad by empowering their sense of belonging and identity. Attendees will learn about the university’s academic rigor from current faculty, meet current students who will share how they balance all sorts of responsibilities, and acquire resources that will help them adjust and succeed on campus.

The program intends to open up spaces to learn and understand college experiences based on issues pertinent to Latinxs rather than framing one’s experience on current dominant narratives.

The program consists of three different modules:

  1. Sense of belonging
  2. Developing student-faculty relationship
  3. Balancing responsibilities

The program intents to open up spaces to learn and understand college experiences based on issues pertinent to Latinos/as rather than framing one’s experience on current dominant narratives.

For this program, three core areas will be addressed, which are based on research findings that have had significant and positive outcomes to help Latinas/os to succeed in college:

  • Sense of belonging has been identified as an important contributor of student success (Hurtado & Carter, 1997). Research indicates that Latinos do not report high levels of sense of belonging at selective institutions (see Kim, Rennick, Franco, 2014).
  • Student-faculty relationships have particularly been known to be a strong positive predictor of persistence among Latino college students.
  • Latino college students tend to work while enrolled in college at higher rates than college students of other racial and ethnic groups (Swail, Cabrera, & Lee, 2004).