Katrina Welcome Center
Fellows students make room for visiting scholars
Mays enrolled 95 Gulf Coast students for the fall 2005 semester, including 30 international students, 27 athletes, and five graduate students. Displaced from their home schools by Hurricane Katrina, they arrived by the end of the third week of classes in fall 2005, stressed and weary and trying to adjust to a new school and home without textbooks, wardrobes, furniture and transportation.
By early September, students in the Mays Fellows program opened a Welcome Center for Katrina students to facilitate donations and offers of help and provide tutoring to help students catch up. The 100 Fellows students, selected for the program that hones their leadership and initiative at Mays, worked in shifts manning the center for two weeks. They folded donated T-shirts, stacked textbook donations (including 30 accounting texts from Thomson Publishing) and matched requests for aid with offers from the Mays community. Individually, they paired up with Gulf Coast students to help them acculturate at A&M and get caught up in Mays classes.
Fellows volunteer Lisa May, a senior finance major, worked 10 hours in the Welcome Center's logistics headquarters. She spent time with a soft-spoken girl from Honduras who fled her home near the Loyola University campus and left her brand-new car behind. The Loyola student, who needed a ride to the mall to buy shoes, confessed to May that she was so overwhelmed, she would break down at night in the first weeks after Katrina.
"She kept saying 'thank you,' over and over again, but for me it was no question," May said. "I don't think we could have not done something to help these students adjust."