Thursday, October 2, 2008

Student Spotlight: Eboni Rivera

One student who has taken full advantage of all that Cabrini Connections has to offer is Eboni Rivera. She’s one of our graduating seniors and will be finishing up her 6th year here at Cabrini Connections. That means that she’s been with us since 7th grade, for the full duration of our program! She’s been paired up with her mentor, Susan, for the past 3 years and they have become a tight-knit pair, sharing everything from their birthdays, to nights out on the town!

Despite being actively pursued by elite schools like Northwestern University, Eboni, who attends Kenwood Academy High School, has her sights set on Florida A&M University, which she fell in love with during a campus visit last year. She hopes to be one of the first graduates of their brand new college of journalism where she plans to specialize in broadcast journalism. She has been diligently taking all of the required journalism classes at Kenwood and is active in both her school newspaper, and the Cabrini Connections writing club. Since her father is Puerto Rican and her mother African-American, she is particularly excited about engaging both aspects of her ethnic heritage at a historically black university located in a state with a large Latino population.

Eboni is also very active in her church, the Christ Universal Temple, where she participates in the Project A.C.H.I.E.V.E. program, a series of Saturday college prep seminars that offer: tutorial classes to prepare students for college placement tests and exams like the ACT and SAT, scholarship opportunities, as well as their annual tour of historically black colleges and universities. She visited Florida A&M through this program last year as well as Clark Atlanta University, her second choice school. We will be working with Eboni throughout the year during the college admissions process to ensure that she gets into her top choice schools and can negotiate the best financial aid possible.

Eboni tells me that “For me, Cabrini Connections is like a second home. I come here for everything I need. I can always use the internet, get help with my college applications, my math homework, and use whatever supplies I want.” Since Eboni will be the first to admit how much she has benefited from her relationship with her mentor and other resources here at Cabrini Connections, she and a friend from church, Kelly, are currently organizing a mentoring group at her church for girls ages 6-18. They hope to offer some of the same types of resources and relationships for at-risk girls in their south side community that Cabrini Connections offers to kids in the Cabrini Green neighborhood. We are so proud to have students like Eboni who are not only on the fast-track to success but are also making efforts to help others follow in their footsteps.

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