Sarah Phillips Serving as Ambassador in SUNY Geneseo's Center for Inquiry, Discovery and Development

2017 Oct 26

Sarah Phillips is among ten SUNY Geneseo student ambassadors in the college's Center for Inquiry, Discovery and Development (CIDD) for the 2017-18 school year.

Student ambassadorships are awards provided by generous donors to fund individual grants of $5,000 each for ambassadors in varied disciplines to carry out self-directed, transformational projects on campus, within the local community or around the world.

Phillips earned the Community Advocates Ambassadorship in Community Engagement. Phillips's project, titled "From Mentors to Main Street: The Freshman Integration Initiative," is creating a peer-mentoring program for struggling first year students. The program will connect a student with an upper classman on the Geneseo campus, as well as a faculty member and a Geneseo community member. They will serve as a mentor for new students and help make their transition into college life smoother by offering advice and guidance during a time that can be extremely challenging.

Working through the CIDD, Student Ambassadors pursue opportunities to develop active learning projects that connect academic work, co-curricular experiences, and community engagement. They are encouraged to design projects that ask meaningful questions about real-world problems and issues, synthesize knowledge and skills drawn from multiple disciplines, and make connections between their academic programs, personal experiences, and co-curricular life.

The ambassadorship began last summer and will extend through the school year. This is the sixth year of the ambassadorship program.