Laurie Callaway is an assistant director with the University of Colorado, Boulder, serving as the university's territory manager for first year recruitment in Southern Califorina while working regionally in the area. Previously, she worked with Saint Louis University as a regional program coordinator and with The College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University as a regional recruiter. In addition to her six years of professional experience, she comes from a college advising family, being the second generation in her family to work in the college admissions field. She is a member of and volunteer with the Regional Counserlors of California and a member of WACAC.
Transcript
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity
Laurie: Hi everyone. My name is Laurie Calloway of pronouns she/hers. I identify as homoromantic and pansexual and also as a cis mostly able-bodied female. So I am an assistant director of admission at the University of Colorado Boulder. I worked in college admissions for the last six years professionally and been associated with college admissions as a volunteer and also as a contributor I would say since my middle teens. I currently work with any first-year applicant from a Southern Californian school.
Arpi: Great. So I spoke to Laurie about issues that LGBTQ students might face when they are considering attending a college. And our first question is a lot of queer and trans students are concerned about finances in college specifically since their parents use finances as a way to deter them from exploring their gender or sexual identities.
Laurie: So one thing that most students are not aware of is that when it comes to education specifically according to the Department of Education, a student is not an independent student until they are 24 or have completed undergraduate programs and are going to grad school. So while that means you receive rights at 18 and you receive rights at 21, educationally you are still a dependent of your parents until you are 24. What this means is that as an educational dependent your parents are the ones who have to fill out the FAFSA. So what this means is that for some students they may not be able to access the full financial opportunities to help students go to college. So with some queer students, some queer students have come out in their teens and they have very supportive families and they have supportive communities and as times have changed that has become more common. But as was my experience and I think the experience of a lot of other people I know, not every single family is accepting of your queerness, of not being cis, and they sometimes will look to control your behavior and to try control who they think you are with the tools that they have at their disposal. One of those tools could be refusing to file a FAFSA for you. Now the big implication of this is that without filing a FAFSA, a student cannot be considered for all the sources of financial aid. If a student is considered a dependent and their family refuses to file the FAFSA for example, they’re only eligible for federal unsubsidized student loans which max out at $5,500. So if I have anyone listening to this who’s currently a teenager who has not applied to college yet, unfortunately, there is a greater burden on you to plan in order for you to be able to achieve the things you want to achieve. And based upon your identity there are different strategies that I employ. So first, for the students for whatever reason who are not able to really take steps on who knows their identity and who doesn’t, basically not everyone is hetero-presenting, not everyone is cis. And for some students being true to your identity is truly a matter of life and death you know and about a matter of your psychological well-being. The more that information is going to be apparent to others, if you have a family that’s not going to be supportive, I would really recommend that you start planning earlier, so if you’re a junior, if you’re a senior, look around your community and try to find adults first of all who can assist. I would recommend considering the counselors at your high school if you think that they can be discrete and they can be trusted with this information. I would also recommend reaching out to queer youth organizations either online or if you have one in your area for that sort of support. I would also recommend that if you think that your family is going to truly refuse to file the FAFSA and use that as a way to manipulate your coming out or manipulate really how you express who you are, I would look into what it takes to be an independent student. Now that is a large burden to take on, you have to file for emancipation, you have to be married, you have to have served in the military, or you have to be homeless or facing elevated risk of homelessness. So for most students, the most easy to access way to become independent is to file for emancipation of a minor. If none of those options appeal to you or if none of those are options to you, you can work with your counselor at your high school, if your counselor at your high school is an ally, you can confide in them and you can talk to them about the potential of filing what is called a Dependency Waiver. A Dependency Waiver is really only eligible to students who are facing abuse or who are at imminent risk of abuse. Manipulating a student by refusing to file the FAFSA is not considered one of the applicable forms of abuse. So it has to be something beyond that. If you meet one of those requirements, your counselor can file a Dependency Waiver with each individual college and individual colleges can consider whether or not to give you that Dependency Waiver. Beyond looking at what it takes to be an independent student and looking at considering if you’re eligible for a Dependency Waiver, if you think neither one of those options are options for you, you may have to consider colleges closer to home with reduced costs or colleges that also have scholarships and support for queer students. So because there are 4200 colleges in the U.S, it’s kind of a little hard to call each one a be like “Hey are you an ally? do you have scholarships for me?” So what I would recommend is again if you are building that college search process, look into the queer resource centers or the diversity and inclusion centers, look into the way they support queer students, look into if there are scholarships for queer students and beyond just entering first-year students queer continuing students for each year in that school. I’d also heavily blanket the basically all of the queer charities’ scholarship applications. I would recommend that you would use Fastweb to look up what scholarships are available for queer students and I would also look into local opportunities for education, so local public schools, local community colleges, small private colleges locally that may be more willing to work with you as a student. And always feel free to reach out to your admission counselors at individual schools even though they work for the school and aren’t your private counselor, if you ever have a point of clarification and you’re thinking of a school on your list, reach out to your designated admission counselor and they may be able to give you more direction.
Arpi: Thanks. And we’re just kind of curious, have you had that experience of having a queer or trans student come into your office asking for advice, advice like what is it like to be LGBTQ in college or just advice on what they should expect? I was just kind of curious if you could speak to your experience about that?
Laurie: Yeah, I think because I’m very hetero and fem-presenting, a lot of students are like, they clock me are they’re like “No.” And then as soon as they actually get to know me they’re like “Oh, you’ve been doing this for a while.” And I’m like “Mhhhmm, Mhhmmm.” Literally founded a group called Gay Party Agenda in senior year of college to queer spaces in my super super hetero, like military-serving college. So yeah, that’s me. But where I usually encounter students is especially at my college fairs and essay workshops that I do. I try to be really careful. First of all I don’t want to profile a student and be like “You’re totally one of us.” Because you know, not every student is ready to come out yet, like even if they’re out, they’re not ready to just be casually out. But I try to create a space through sort of asking about pronouns or offering my own. If there’s an applicable or appropriate way to be like “In my experience,” I try to share that experience. I’ve had the experience also of some students almost sort of very like confrontationally trying to out themselves because I think they expect that I’ll be like “Ahhhh”, you know something like that and I’ll be like “Yeah, no that works.” But I think students who do that, do that because they’re really trying to find spaces that they know will be comfortable for them and they’re trying to provoke that initial reaction to see like “Would this person be okay?” So I’m really lucky to have worked for institutions, like I’ve outed myself at every job interview because I need to know. So I’ve worked for institutions that have been really supportive of me. But what I tend to do for my students who are queer is I want to advise them and give them the same amount of opportunities as I give every other student. I have a queer student who might also be a student who struggles with celiac disease and is going to need to know a lot more about our office of disability services and how we provide accommodations and potential breaks in the queer student. A queer student may also be a BIPOC student and may have more than one identity they are looking to have represented and reflected. So I try to provide any of the students I work with support in their identities but I’m also not trying to pigeonhole them into their identities because I never know what a student is going to need most on our campus. What I’m trying to model in my interactions with students is helpfulness, useful resources, and just a reaction from an older adult figure of acceptance and sort of “This is very normalized, this is totally fine. Other people are going to be fine that way too.” And so far taking that measured approach has I think been useful.
Arpi: And I think there’s a heightened anxiety now especially with the coronavirus going on and I think even CU isn’t sure exactly what it’s going to look like for Fall 2020. What advice do you have for students who are concerned maybe not so much about their well being but what changes to colleges will mean if they were dead set on going into a STEM career, especially because STEM careers generally require a higher level of education and there’s just an expectation that you’re going to embark on this great educational journey and do all these things along the way and it can be a little bit unnerving if that seems like it’s being threatened in any way.
Laurie: So I think first of all it is actually a really good opportunity especially for the students who are future applicants or who are going to be applying this fall. You are being given a chance right now to see how institutions practice values. So what that means is for example, when CU closed, CU kept the residence halls open and maintained enough staff to make sure we were supporting students who did not have safe homes to go home to. So when you’re looking at how institutions function, not every queer student is concerned with values, again I don’t want to pigeonhole all of us, but in general for queer students, values in how students are supported and opportunities and amenities for students are more important. “Will they welcome me? Will they put me back into a dangerous situation? Will they listen to me if I say this is not working for me?” So you have as a potential applicant now a way to see how a college institution will live its values and do the sort of nitty-gritty work of figuring out the details to support students in a way that you don’t usually have at any other time. You know, schools can tout their codes, and their principles, and their policies but you really want to see what do they do when they have to do it. So use this time to look into how institutions handled the shut-down in March. See what reactions their students had. See how they supported their students. That’s going to be a first key indicator of if you think culturally, you are a match with that school. When it comes to STEM students, I work with a fair amount of STEM students being a CU Boulder employee, and I think, this is my personal hypothesis, I think that because from the outside STEM seems very regimented and STEM students tend to think that “There’s a window and if I miss it, I’m done. And I’ll never get in. Or I’ll never launch my career and nothing will ever happen.” But at the same time we’re always telling ourselves stories of how the dropouts have changed our world. So if you start thinking about that a little bit, you’ll start to see that even in sort of two of the foundational myths, or two important myths in STEM, those don’t even align. So by saying this what I’m trying to really do is ease your worries. Literally every single Fall 2021 first-year applicant to college is going to be facing the same issues. There’s not going to be a single college in this country or any other that’s going to be like “Hmmm, I wonder, did that have a real impact? Should we include that in our review?” Yes, we are all going to be including that in our reviews, in our evaluation policies, in our change of practices. We’re aware and we’re responsive of this. Also, you are going to be really building a career, a 40, 60 year long career. This is not just about the entry pathway. So maybe in your first year if you’re going to be going to school in the fall in college, maybe you don’t do your labs in that first year, maybe you’re working on some of your electives and some of your prerequisites. You know what that does? Frees up time in the last three years to do all the other stuff so you’re still graduating in four years. So I would say generally, relax. Trust the institutions in terms of reaching out to them and asking them what their policies are. Research the institutions in terms of how they practice their policies. And take pressure off of you to think that your window has closed. The world still needs engineers and chemists and the world is not going to take an entire years’ worth of future engineers and chemists and junk them in the trash bin because “sorry that year was weird.” You know, the entire world would feel that impact. So we still want you and need you and we’re going to evolve to be able to support you.
Arpi: Well thanks, Laurie. This was really helpful for a lot of students.
Laurie: Well, I hope so. Good.
Transcribed by Sophia Ulmer