Nicole Soper:
Without C3 Mobility or even Cielo as my mentor, I don’t know how I would be doing in community college right now if I’m being honest.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed, I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice from Nicole Soper. Nicole’s in her first year at Mesa College, a community college in San Diego. Last year she graduated from High Tech High, and in between finishing high school and starting college, she took part in a summer program called the C3 Mobility DAO. That’s spelled D-A-O. We’ll get to that in just a bit.
C3 Mobility DAO was a pilot project created by the High Tech High Graduate School of Education’s CARPE Collaborative with a very specific goal, to help students from underrepresented populations navigate the transition from high school to community college and then from community college to a four-year university. Here’s Jonathan Villafuerte, one of the creators of C3 Mobility DAO, to explain the precise issue they had, identified a phenomenon known as summer melt.

Jonathan Villafuerte:
Which is the phenomenon where students say that they are planning to enroll at a community college or at a four-year college and then ultimately don’t make the complete transition because of the challenges that they encounter over the summer.

Alec Patton:
Ben Sanoff, director of data analytics for the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, told me how pervasive summer melt is across the country.

Ben Sanoff:
We know that anywhere from 20 to 40% of students who indicate in the spring of senior year that they plan to enroll in college, unfortunately, don’t actually enroll by the first day of college.

Alec Patton:
And is that California students or is that nationally?

Ben Sanoff:
That’s national, and that’s in the research. And then, to be more specific, amongst the 30-plus high schools in the CARPE Network, that number is 27% over the last two years. So that’s the California number, and it’s really one in three students, a little bit less than that, right, who tell us they plan to go to college, don’t enroll. So yeah, the scale of the problem is large.
And I think the one way to think about the challenge of supporting students who say, “Hey, I plan to enroll in community college,” and getting them to a four-year college is as a leaky pipeline, right. So you’re losing some students over the summer. And then you’re losing more students to the challenges that they face once they actually get to the community college, navigating the transfer to a four-year process.

Alec Patton:
The group trying to patch this leaky pipeline was the CARPE Collaborative. So ask Ben what exactly CARPE is.

Ben Sanoff:
CARPE is a network to improvement community, and that’s just a way of saying that we bring together 30 plus high schools in Southern California to work collaboratively to tackle the problem of supporting more low-income students of color enrolling in colleges they’re most likely to graduate from.

Alec Patton:
And so, how did CARPE identify summer melt and two-year colleges as a specific paired issue?

Ben Sanoff:
We have identified, based on a review of the research literature and based on some initial work we did within our own five High Tech High schools, summer melt is a really large issue. And what we have tried so far is to reach out to students proactively, tell them that we’re available to help them over the summer, give them information they need to enroll successfully using text messages. And using that strategy, we have been able to reduce the rate of summer melt.
Unfortunately, that strategy has not worked as well with students who plan to enroll in a two-year college. So I think where it came from was, “Hey, we have kind of implemented, if you want to call it a tier year one strategy to reach all students and try to reduce summer melt. But what we’re noticing is there’s a specific group of students enrolling in two-year colleges or planning to enroll in two-year colleges who need more help, who need more support.”

Alec Patton:
So then what is C3 Mobility DAO?

Ben Sanoff:
So we wanted to just learn more about the problem. Why was it that a lot of students who planned to enroll in two-year colleges didn’t enroll over the summer? And also, what challenges did they encounter when they got to the community colleges of navigating the transfer process? And I would just say what we heard from the empathy interviews we did was that the students themselves had much more information about what the problem was and how to successfully navigate the process within a community college of enrolling and transferring.

And so from there, it became like we want to do peer-to-peer. We want this to be a mentor supporting a mentee. And then I think what we realized was there’s a lot of questions in the continuous improvement field about how do we involve students. What does it mean for students to be involved in an improvement community? And for us, we started to think, well, maybe it’s as simple as it’s a student-led improvement community where it’s really like the mentors and the mentees who are directing this work themselves with a little bit of support from us who bring the methodology and the sort of practices of how we make this consistent with an improvement community.

Alec Patton:
Here’s Jonathan again to give some specifics about who is in that student-led improvement community.

Jonathan Villafuerte:
We started with about 14 high school seniors graduating from across a few of our High Tech High schools.

Alec Patton:
And so you these… you’ve identified these High Tech High seniors, and you want to find peers for them who can help them both stay the course over the summer and actually enroll in the fall, and then also have those resources and those skills they need to stay in school once they start in college.

Jonathan Villafuerte:
That’s right, Alec. And actually, the beautiful part about this is that the mentors that we identified graduated from the exact same high school system. So they understand the experiences that the high school seniors are having up to this point. And they attended or are attending the very same community college that these seniors plan to attend, so they can speak directly to their experiences and how to navigate the system of this community college.

Alec Patton:
So how do you go about finding a bunch of college students who graduated from your high school?

Jonathan Villafuerte:
We use Clearinghouse data to pinpoint where our students are attending college. And then the process after that was to conduct an empathy interview where we called some of these college students to ask them about the experience, the support that they had in transitioning from high school to college. What could have been better, and how do they see themselves actually becoming a mentor in this program?
And through that process, we were able to identify four phenomenal mentor candidates that not only attended the community college but also transferred to a four-year university and are currently finishing their studies there. And one student who is still at the community college.

Alec Patton:
One of the college students who C3 Mobility recruited as a mentor was Cielo Cruz, a High Tech High graduate who just transferred from Mesa College to Cal Poly Pomona. Here’s Cielo.

Cielo Cruz:
So it was my first semester at Cal Poly Pomona, so successfully transferring from Mesa. I got a call maybe a few weeks before classes started from High Tech. Jonathan called me from C3 Mobility to talk about how my time at Mesa went and how I was able to transfer successfully. So it wasn’t originally that I was going to be a mentor.

Alec Patton:
When did it become, “Hey, would you like to be a mentor?”

Cielo Cruz:
It was probably our second call. When they’ve originally said the idea to me, I was super excited to be involved in something like that because I know for me it was a difficult process, so having somebody that experienced it and guiding me would’ve been awesome.
And I got lucky that one of the mentors that I got to work with during this program was one of the people that did help me through my two years at Mesa, and she went to High Tech, was Guadalupe, and she was awesome. But to be somebody that could help just like she did for me, I would… just wanted to be a part of that process.

Alec Patton:
Guadalupe was Cielo’s counselor through something called the Promise Program.

Cielo Cruz:
When you graduate, and you apply to Mesa, you have this option of choosing Promise program, which is a program that guides you through your first year at a community college. And they help provide payment for the school as well. So when I went to Mesa, I didn’t pay anything but books.
Promise paid for me to attend school as long as I kept a 2.0 GPA, and I attended the weekly Weekly Promise meetings, which Guadalupe was my assigned student counselor. So she would help me with any questions that I had at Mesa.

Alec Patton:
So you had her as a sort of separate from the counselor thing counselor?

Cielo Cruz:
Yes. So if I had any questions [inaudible 00:09:10], she was the one that I would go to. I’d be like, “I met with the counselor, and they told me this.” And she goes, “If you feel unsure about it, I would just sign up again and try again.”

Alec Patton:
And so Jonathan got in touch and kind of asked you about, “Hey, what was your experience at Mesa like?” And you talked to him kind of similar to what we just talked about?

Cielo Cruz:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
And then he called back and was like, “Hey, we’re starting this thing.” Is that what happened?

Cielo Cruz:
Well, they didn’t ask me to be a mentor. They asked if I would like the opportunity to try to be one. And I did have to go through an interview process as well with Ben and Jonathan, and that’s how I became a mentor after the interview process.

Alec Patton:
This brings us back to Nicole, who you heard at the very start of the episode. Nicole is one of the high school seniors who’s offered a spot in the C3 Mobility program. When did you hear that Cielo was going to be your mentor?

Nicole Soper:
When we had our very, very first meeting about the C3 program and just getting to meet all the mentees and mentors. And I was in her table, and I was like, “Oh my God, I know who Cielo is. She went to my school.” So I was very happy that I had Cielo as a mentor. I was very excited for it.

Alec Patton:
And Cielo, when did you find out that you were going to be mentoring Nicole?

Cielo Cruz:
I also found out that morning because we had a group meeting before all the mentees came in, and they gave us a list of names. And I remember reading Nicole’s name, but it wasn’t until I saw her that I had recognized her. I feel like we connect just instantly right away. And we talked about how she was doing and how school was, and what she was excited for when the year was starting to wrap up.
So it was really fun getting to meet Nicole and continuing to talk to her because we do follow each other on social media, and we text. I do text her sometimes about school and how Mesa’s going. So I feel like this program has really brought us closer together as well.

Alec Patton:
In fact, everyone got along pretty well at that first event, which was good because, as well as being a near-to-peer mentorship program for high school seniors, C3 Mobility DAO was a pretty radical experiment in direct democracy. The clue is in that word DAO. It stands for Distributed Autonomous Organization. I’d never heard it before I learned about C3, neither had Cielo. Were you familiar with the concept of a DAO before C3 Mobility DAO?

Cielo Cruz:
No, I was not. And then, they had used the term a few times, and I still didn’t completely understand it. And then they had broke it down for me, just kind of explaining that there was no leader. It was everyone making a collective decision together.

Alec Patton:
Ben gave me a more technical breakdown of how a DAO works. But first, he made what I think is a pretty important point about the role of governance in continuous improvement.

Ben Sanoff:
Something that’s under-discussed in the field of improvement in education currently is a question of governance of who actually gets to make decisions on behalf of the network. And I think that in some of our networks, including CARPE, we, as the hub, sort of operate as these sort of technocrats, if you want to call it. We have the expertise and improvement, and so we should sort of make decisions on behalf of the greater good of what the network should do or what it shouldn’t.
And most critically, how funding should be spent. And I think getting governance is extremely complex, and I think the sweet spot is actually somewhere in the middle between having a centralized group as well as the schools themselves make decisions. But I fear that too often, in improvement, it is the hub that is sort of exercising governance rights over what should be a community.
And this is just my personal story. I went deep down the crypto rabbit hole several years ago and started reading about and also participating in some DAO, so Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. And to be clear, I don’t think these are the [inaudible 00:13:08] bullet. I think sometimes they go too far. But essentially, how a DAO works is every member gets a token, right, that’s built on top of a crypto network, oftentimes on the Ethereum network.
And they get to propose, and then they get to vote on any decision that impacts that community or that project. And just sort of that act of locating governance firmly within the community and that sort of the project is owned and governed by members of the community, I think, is really powerful. And I think there’s things that we could learn from in improvement with that model. So I think that’s kind of what we were trying to test and experiment with.
Something else that I think is really important for the C3 project is we wanted it to be a student-led network. And I think, as adults, it takes a lot of discipline to get out of the way and actually let students run the thing and be in charge. And so some of what we were trying to do was kind of this principle of we want this to be a DAO because we want to make sure that that actually happens. And so we wanted to go in that direction, in a way, to hold ourselves as adults to the principle of, “We truly want this to be a student-led project.”
Now, I want to say there’s some limitations and some caveats on it. I think, as adults, we do have some agency and some responsibility to put in place structures to ensure that the project’s successful. So what we’re not advocating for and what we didn’t do is just sort of say, “You got this kids,” and walk out of the room. We were definitely, I think, trying to shape the path for this community to be successful. But we are, at its core, really committed to the idea of this being a student-led organization, and a DAO is a pretty interesting and extreme way to sort of manifest that reality.

Alec Patton:
We’ve both been teachers. You see a million situations where a teacher’s like, “Oh yeah, the kids in charge.” But everyone knows the kids aren’t in charge, and the teacher’s actually doing it. Is there something about making it a DAO that makes it innately more student-led and less fake student-led?

Ben Sanoff:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think just to answer really concretely to that, in terms of the question of governance. What’s the process, and how are decisions made as a community? That’s the core question of is it student-led or not, right. Because it’s like you can call it student-led, but if the adults are still making all the decisions, it is not student-led.
So a DAO, right, offers a very clear kind of governance structure where, again, every member of the DAO was issued a governance token. And we use this piece of software called Snapshot. And essentially, the way it works is someone can propose, “Hey, I think we should make this change.” So, for example, one of the mentors proposed, “In the future, we should have more community events in person where we bring people together, and then everyone with their tokens gets to vote. And all that’s on chain. It’s all transparent and public.”
So again, that structure I feel like really forced us to make decisions as a community and as a collaborative. And again, I think one thing that would be a logical question to ask is, “Isn’t this just direct democracy?” And the answer is yes. This is just direct democracy enabled by the distribution of tokens on blockchains.

Alec Patton:
Were there any points where people were proposing stuff, and you were like, “Oh, I think they’re making a mistake here?” Did you have sort of grown-up panic moments?

Ben Sanoff:
Yes, but also, once we were committed to this idea that was baked in, that was going to be part of it. And I think, just to also say one other two other things. We were very conscientious in creating a structure where we weren’t just sort of blindly voting on proposals, that there was a pretty involved kind of discussion and advocacy process that was followed to make sure that we were, as a group, weeding out ideas that might have some problematic elements before they came up for a vote.

Alec Patton:
I have to admit I was skeptical about how authentically student-led this group could have been. So I asked Cielo. She said it was legit. In fact, she made it sound less structured than Ben did.

Cielo Cruz:
Oh, at the beginning of the program, I thought there was going to be a little bit of a structure to follow, but when we had met one of the first times as mentors, and they were like, “Okay, well, what should we do?” I think we were a little bit confused at first because I have never been put in a situation where I was kind of a head person to run this program. So we all had to work together to develop what we wanted the students to know, like the main points.

Alec Patton:
What do you mean for what the students to know?

Cielo Cruz:
The steps that they should take. So enrolling at Mesa, enrolling at Summer CRUISE.

Alec Patton:
Real quick. Summer CRUISE is a program that Mesa College runs for new students.

Cielo Cruz:
Getting a peer navigator, signing up for those first classes, those are the main… important steps that they had to follow. And we had to guide them through that.

Alec Patton:
So the stuff that would eventually become the checklist?

Cielo Cruz:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
So you actually came up with those collectively?

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah. As mentors, we ourselves decided, “Well, this is an important step to me.” For me, it was signing up for CRUISE. We definitely need to do that. So that made it onto the checklist, and that was talked over with other mentors. And is that something that everyone should do? And Guadalupe had brought up signing up for classes, making sure that we have everyone sign up for the first 12 units.

Alec Patton:
Hang on. Guadalupe, your mentor from…

Cielo Cruz:
From Mesa. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
From Mesa.

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah. So I worked alongside her.

Alec Patton:
I didn’t realize that. That’s so cool.

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah, I thought so too. What was really exciting about this program is I got to work with someone who was my mentor.

Alec Patton:
That’s really cool. Now, Nicole, do you remember the first thing that you were like needed help with?

Nicole Soper:
How to get used to the new transition from High Tech High to Mesa College. And also the idea of how am I going to transfer from a community to a four-year university. I feel like those were the two major things that I really needed help on.

Cielo Cruz:
I think she was a little bit nervous about it starting, and as we continued our conversations because we had weekly conversations through Zoom to see how she was doing in the process, because we have this… like the Airtable program, which is just a system for mentors to help support the mentees.

Alec Patton:
Quick interjection. Right here, Cielo is talking about an online program that the C3 Mobility team built for mentors and mentees using a program called Airtable. We’ve got a link in the show notes to an article about how educators can build their own software using programs like Airtable. Now, back to Cielo.

Cielo Cruz:
It was a checklist. The checklist had a few main steps. And Nicole, if you want to help me here. It was to apply to CRUISE. Then you had to go to the two to three days of CRUISE, and then you get a mentor at Mesa.

Nicole Soper:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Cielo Cruz:
And then signing up for classes. So it was weekly meetings, just making sure that they were doing that process. And every time I would meet with Nicole, she’d be like, “Oh yeah, have it done, but I do have a question about this.”

Nicole Soper:
Mm-hmm.

Cielo Cruz:
And she was always giving me questions to answer for her just to make the transition smooth from high school to college.

Nicole Soper:
Yeah, I asked a lot of questions.

Alec Patton:
What were you asking about? Do you remember?

Nicole Soper:
One of the questions were like, how do I apply to my classes and how do I know that I’m applying to the right ones? That definitely was one of my questions. What was transferrable for my major and the college I wanted to go to?

Alec Patton:
And Cielo, what’s it been like seeing Nicole in her first semester?

Cielo Cruz:
It’s again, I enjoy talking to Nicole and seeing how excited she was for school and seeing her grow, because she does push through a lot of stuff to go to school. I had told her when we had met up for one of the last meetings because I think she was nervous about how she was going to do, and I said that she was already doing really well, taking the steps to apply to Mesa and apply to all these classes. And she was already on the right step to being successful as a transfer.

Alec Patton:
Other than your weekly meetings, were you meeting with other folks in the program? What was happening with that? Were you meeting with Ben? Were meeting with Jonathan?

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah. So as a mentor, I had two meetings. I had one with all my mentees, which was individual. So I guess I had around five meetings a week. So I’d meet with Nicole and my other three mentees, and then I would meet with all the mentors, Ben, Jonathan, Sofia. And we would talk about how everything was going, and if there was any worries about the mentees, everything would be tracked on Airtable.
So the process or any questions that I couldn’t answer at the time, I would bring it to these meetings with Ben and Sofia and Jonathan and I would tell them the struggles that people were facing. And then, they would give me suggestions on how to guide the mentee. I really loved all the meetings, but, for sure, the ones that I took the most out of just because I got to talk a lot about the process and how to become a mentor, and how to say the right things.
I really enjoyed the meetings that I had with all the mentors and Ben Sanoff and Sofia and Jonathan because they taught me how to guide people. But then also just being able to talk out some of the issues that we are having, not issues, but problems that we were having on how to guide people the right way.

Alec Patton:
Sofia, who Cielo just mentioned, is Sofia Tannenhaus, an improvement coach at the High Tech High GSE. And, as it happens, the improvement editor at Unboxed. Sofia explained to me that these meetings were modeled on what’s called a huddle protocol in continuous improvement.
The purpose of a huddle protocol is to look at current data, identify themes, generate ideas to improve current outcomes, and for each person to leave the meeting with a clear next step. I had another question for Cielo about these meetings. Can you give us one mentoring tip that you got from that?

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah, we were talking about being positive with certain information. Being a transfer student is really hard, and we don’t want to have a negative tone about classes and counseling because we don’t want to scare people. So I’d… being more positive about things and just kind of really thinking about what you’re saying, so you’re not scaring the mentees.

Alec Patton:
Got it. And just to check, even on days that Nicole’s like, “I’ve got no questions.” You still had your checklist, right?

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Alec Patton:
You’d still be like, “Hey, have you got these things done and…”

Cielo Cruz:
“Yeah, you’re on the right track, and you’re doing great.” And then I’d ask it. There doesn’t have to be technical questions. It could be like, “Well, what is it like to make friends? Or how can I put myself out there? So stuff like that that we would talk about. So everything was related back to Mesa.

Alec Patton:
How do you make friends?

Cielo Cruz:
That one is a hard one. It was hard for me to do that, but I had suggested having always an extra pen if somebody needed anything, extra pen, having gum in your backpack, just something small to talk to the person next to you.

Alec Patton:
Nicole, did you try that?

Nicole Soper:
Yeah. I mean, so coming into Mesa and kind of my first week of school, it was definitely hard for me to come out of my shell because definitely, in high school, I was very out there. I was a social butterfly. I still am. Just since I am now in college, it’s kind of just a different vibe now. I feel like I really can’t be that social butterfly. But obviously, whenever somebody asks for a pen or a pencil or gum, I always give it to them. I always make small talk, and I always make sure to have a friend in each of my classes.
And I think that’s what Cielo has taught me too is, “Try to make a friend in each of your classes just because if you miss a day, you could ask them for notes.” That’s what I definitely did. But out of those small little conversations, I did make some genuine friendships that I have right now. And hopefully second semester, I can make more of those friends.

Alec Patton:
Now we’re going to bring Jonathan back to talk about a key piece of C3 Mobility that we haven’t touched on yet. Everyone, mentors, and mentees got paid for taking part. Here’s Jonathan.

Jonathan Villafuerte:
We ensured that our mentors and our mentees were both compensated for the participation in the program. Oftentimes when we are talking to BIPOC students, first-generation students, we asked them to go above and beyond to be successful.
And we say, “You need to do a lot more than your other peers because you’re already starting off behind.” And so, we wanted to encourage participation and really make that reward feedback loop a lot sooner by compensating students as they went for completing different enrollment task.

Alec Patton:
I’m really curious about this because I think this is really cool. I also think the college students getting compensated makes perfect sense. The seniors getting compensated is a little more weird at first glance.

Jonathan Villafuerte:
Mm-hmm.

Alec Patton:
So tell me about that. Did it feel weird paying people for something that was effectively a program to help them personally do better in college?

Jonathan Villafuerte:
Absolutely not. Because what we have found by some of the empathy interviews was that oftentimes what prevented seniors from actually enrolling is that they had to get a job over the summer. And once they started getting that job, right, they started getting a little money in their pocket, then it became easier for them just to disregard the entire concept of attending a community college.
And oftentimes, even for students that are going through the enrollment process, the one determining factor was something simple as the parking permit that they couldn’t afford, right. The books that they couldn’t afford. Maybe even starting to think about how are they going to pay for gas or transportation to get to school. And so for us to say, “Hey, we got you covered as long as you are completing these tasks over the summer,” seemed like the right thing to do.

Alec Patton:
This kind of compensation is unusual, but it’s not the most unusual thing about how C3 Mobility DAO dealt with money. Here’s Ben.

Ben Sanoff:
What was radical about it was the assumption that, “Hey, the resources and the money we have as a community to support this work is going to be allocated based on basically that the mentors and the adults would collectively make those decisions together.” And so that the mentors really had agency over again, the budget and how money was being divvied up.
That also extended to we had an emergency grants program where our mentee could ask for funding if they were counting a financial hardship. The decisions about who to fund were made by the mentors. And I think finally, the voting on the direction of the program moving forward and having the mentors really have that direct say, all of those things feel pretty different, at least to me, in terms of other programs that have existed.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then when you said about that, they took pretty consequential votes about where the program would go. What does that mean? Because we’d all have to be able to vote on whether our grant-led programs continue or not, but it’s sort of out of our hands generally. So what were they voting on?

Ben Sanoff:
Yeah, well, so just I think the most consequential and maybe most different thing is we kind of deliberately underspent, right. So we had about half of our funding left over. So we were voting on what do we do with that surplus.

Alec Patton:
What did you do with that?

Ben Sanoff:
The thing we were voting on essentially was like, “Do we distribute it to this current pilot cohort, or do we kind of push it into the future for the sustainability of the program?” And the mentors were very adamant that we push it to the future so that this program could continue and that we’d have funding.

Alec Patton:
Right. So you brought up the emergency grants. Say a little more about that.

Ben Sanoff:
Yeah. I mean, I think in the research literature and also in the field, there’s a recognition that students encounter financial difficulties. Things like paying for gas, fixing a car. I’m naming all the transportation things, but also a family issue where, “I can’t pay for internet at the house, or I can’t pay for my books for the semester.” Right. So relatively small amounts of dollars we’re talking about in the context of the total cost of the educational experience. But when they encounter that, and they can’t get any access to the money, it’s like spirals, and it leads to them, in some cases, not persisting in college.
And again, I think the literature really talks to this a lot. So we wanted to offer the same opportunity to both mentees and mentors, that at any point, they could basically fill out a five-minute form, document what the struggle they were facing, and then within 48 hours, we would bring together a small group that included mentors of like, “Hey, what did we think about this proposal? Should we fund it or not?”

Alec Patton:
Did you choose not to fund any?

Ben Sanoff:
We did not choose. One thing I’ll say is we didn’t have as many proposals. I didn’t know what to expect to be clear. But we had… Let’s see. We had three proposals, and all of them seemed like very reasonable. And so there was never really a question of the need of the proposal.

Alec Patton:
I asked Nicole and Cielo about the money aspect of the program. Was it important that you got paid for this?

Nicole Soper:
Me, if I’m being honest, I personally didn’t care about the money. I just really needed that mentor to kind of just guide me and hold my hand through this process. Just because me and Cielo both come from a project-based school. We have those similar struggles kind of going into a community college that isn’t project-based, it’s for traditional-based.
And being able to ask for help and ask for advice from someone who has been through that experience was way more important to me than the money because I feel like without C3 Mobility or even Cielo as my mentor, I don’t know how I would be doing in community college right now if I’m being honest.
And I remember going to her, I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know how I’m doing in this class.” And just the fact that we were able to connect on that and relate was very just… it was an ease for me. It was very… Yeah, [inaudible 00:32:49] was at ease.

Cielo Cruz:
Yeah. I also agree. I didn’t interview with the hopes that I would get paid. I truly did interview because I would’ve loved to have this program when I was at High Tech and graduating just because I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be. So being able to help the people that graduated from High Tech and going to the community college I went to and being able to guide them, that was something that I really, really wanted to do.

Alec Patton:
Those are all my questions. Is there anything else I should have asked you about, or anything else you want to tell people about before we go?

Cielo Cruz:
I’m not sure if the program is going to continue, but I really do think that it’s a great program that High Tech has offered their students, their graduating students. I think it should continue. The structure and system that they had to support the mentees through, like Airtable, even though it was a pilot, I think it did a great job and it was successful. And to be able to continue doing that to help other students go to higher education, it’s a great program.

Nicole Soper:
Yeah, I definitely do agree. C3 should definitely continue, and especially with the new graduating class of 2023. I know some people that are going to be going into community college, and I definitely do recommend this program to them just because just the transition from High Tech High to a community is way different. So I feel like they just need all the support they need, and C3 is definitely fit for that. And hopefully, one day, I could be a mentor in the future once I’m done with Community College.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed, it’s hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Nicole Soper, Jonathan Villafuerte, Ben Sanoff, and Cielo Cruz for talking to us. We’ve got links to a bunch of articles about C3 Mobility and related projects in the show notes. Thanks for listening.