As a freshman, Sara Grace King felt sort of included in undergraduate life.
Married and living in the graduate student enclave of Escondido Village, King was one of Stanford’s approximately 100 “nontraditional” undergrads, including students who live with domestic partners, children or parents. She was officially affiliated with Wilbur Hall’s Junipero dorm, where she was assigned to an academic advising group and where she and her husband, Lucas, were encouraged to take part in social events. But it was tough to really be part of things there. “We would go to Junipero a lot, but people rarely came to our apartment,” King recalls. “I realized I was missing out on the kinds of things that happen when you’re all hanging out in the hall late at night and someone says, ‘Let’s go for pizza.’”
King began discussing her disappointments with director of residential education Jane Camarillo, and—to her surprise—talked herself into the newly created position of head peer academic coordinator for Escondido Village. This fall, King trained with the 30 other coordinators, who are assigned to freshman dorms, and she now has taken four nontraditional freshmen under her wing. And although she can help them decipher the course catalog or drop a class, she spends more time ensuring that they’ve developed a social network.
Two of King’s fledgling four, Mirrielees residents Mabrookah Heneidi and Rania Eltom, asked to live in a campus apartment. As Muslims, Heneidi and Eltom pray five times each day, do ablutions before each prayer and cover themselves in front of men to whom they are not related. They do not smoke, drink or date. “We don’t separate ourselves from our religion, and a freshman dorm would not be very conducive to our practices,” Heneidi says. Instead of hanging out with freshmen at their affiliated dorm, whom Heneidi finds a bit “rowdy and off-the-wall,” they are making friends and finding their way through contacts in the Muslim and black student communities.
“And that’s all I really do—make sure they’re being taken care of,” says King, who checks in by e-mail every few weeks. “I just want to know they have a place where they feel they belong.”
