FOOT sets its sights on applicant diversity

JULIA TIERNAN/YH FOOT leaders talked to minority students at La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos about their perceptions of the program.

Popularity has never been a problem for the Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trips (FOOT) program. This year, over 150 students applied for 30 to 40 trip-leader positions, and places for incoming frosh always fill up quickly over the course of the summer. But recently, the organizers of FOOT have realized that the program's popularity has not extended equally across all ethnic groups.

FOOT Coordinator Jacob Heitler, ES '99, said the program's organizing committee, the core, recently noted the lack of minorities among FOOT leaders and frosh participants (FOOTies) and decided it was about time start combating this trend.

"One of the issues that the core has discussed is that we're afraid that both in freshman participation and in leaders, there tends to be not as balanced
a ratio of diversity amongst the leaders and the FOOTies as there
is at Yale," Heitler said.

FOOT leader Joseph Montgomery, BK '01, believes part of the problem is that the group is perceived as a tightly-knit, impenetrable clique. "FOOT leaders are white," he said. "A lot of leaders are roommates with other leaders. It is a fairly tight group that spends time together throughout the year. It is a group of people who have gotten to know each other at times when the stress and schedule of school don't matter."

FOOT leader Emilie Hitch, PC '00, attributed the lack of diversity to many minority undergrads' preference for the more minority-oriented Pre-Registration Orientation Program (PROP). She also said she believes that former FOOTies who are minority members shy away from the program after their experiences. "The lack of minorities as leaders may have a subconscious influence on the FOOTies, so minorities do not go on to apply to be leaders because they do not
have that role model right away, so they do not project themselves into the position of `that could be me next year,'" Hitch explained.

One new measure the core instituted this term to tackle these problems was to make the first round of applications for FOOT leader positions anonymous. "Reading the application is much easier without knowing who it is," Argyro Caminis, BR '00, a member of the core and a major proponent of the anonymous first round, explained. "For people applying, it's a good thing if you think that your name is not going to affect you either way. You really want to get in because of your application."

Heitler added, "We decided to implement the anon-ymous first round in order to give those people who might have had a bad experience with one leader a chance to start on the same foot with all the other applicants." He noted that the results have been positive so far. "Nobody has had any preconceptions of the people who applied. I think that it went really well. This process involves an enormous amount of looking at peers, and FOOT is making all the attempts it can to make that a sensitive process."

To gauge minority students' attitudes towards FOOT, leaders have headed to several cultural houses to explain the program and and dispel any misconceptions about it. Heitler has found the information that has been gathered so far surprising. "We got very interesting responses. Some members of the ethnic community pointed out that they felt like camping was a culture-linked activity," he said.

Eva Sanchez, DC '00, vice-chair of the Puerto Rican student group Despierta Boricua, participated in one of these discussions. "The FOOT leaders explained that they were trying to make the program more appealing to prospective minority students," she said.

Sanchez believes the key reason for the lack of minority FOOTies isn't ethnicity, but money. "Being a minority didn't seem a reason to stop people from going on the trips," she said. "A number of frosh I know said they would have liked to go camping, but it was just a financial issue."

Heitler explained that economic constraints shouldn't prevent pre-frosh from participating in the program, but he found Sanchez's insights helpful. "It wasn't clear enough on FOOT's information that there is an enormous amount of financial aid available," he admitted. "Publicity hasn't pushed that as much as we wanted."

Heitler and the other leaders of FOOT believe that the combination of the anonymous first round of applications and implementing minority undergraduates' suggestions will lead to great increases in the diversity of each trip group of 11 FOOTies and two leaders.

"Let's say that there were 11 FOOTies who had also done PROP. On one hand, that sounds like not so many," he said. "On the other hand, if nine students go on 11 different trips, then 99 kids have some link to minority communities on campus. If those links are formed early, it makes an enormous impact on the tightness of the [Yale] community."

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