By Marvin Villanueva, Feb. 28, 2023
PolyTransfer and ASI hosted a Paint & Sip event at the Bronco Student Center on Feb. 21 to give transfer students the opportunity to meet and make art together. To spotlight transfer students at Cal Poly Pomona, PolyTransfer and ASI BEAT have been hosting Transfer Tuesdays together, a series of events throughout the month of February geared to celebrate CPP transfers.
The third Transfer Tuesday event, Paint & Sip, provided attendees with snacks, beverages and rows of acrylic paints. Dozens of transfer students and even some non-transfer students came excited to partake in the craftiness of the event.
“I think it’s a great thing we have these events to build community and a sense of belonging on campus,” said Karen Barragan, a civic engagement program lead for ASI. “We want to guide them towards resources such as PolyTransfer that they can rely on throughout their journey at Cal Poly.”
While events celebrating transfer students have been held before, such as Transfer Appreciation Week, this is the first year Transfer Tuesdays has been held at CPP. Barragan believes that events like these are important because it hits a certain student population that other departments may not focus on. Barragan explained that because CPP has many transfer students, events like these are necessary to show them how important they are to the campus community.
Preceding the Paint & Sip, the first Transfer Tuesday events included a DIY grab-and-go tote event where students were encouraged to decorate tote bags and a Valentine’s Day celebration that allowed attendees to create grams for their loved ones. These events will eventually lead to the final Transfer Tuesday event, their send-off bash Transfer Celebration Night.
Civic Engagement Program Lead Sarah Navarro believes students will have more of an opportunity to attend more of these events as each Transfer Tuesday is spaced out between every week of February.
“We’ve gotten some feedback of students loving the actual DIY portion of the event, because I feel like they feel engaged and they also get to meet different students here on campus,” Navarro said.
As student attendance has gotten higher, Barragan and Navarro expressed their desire to create a welcoming space for transfer students to unwind from their busy schedules and do something fun as a community.
During the event, students were encouraged to pick up palettes of paint, canvases and a variety of different paint brushes to create anything they wanted.
Computer science student Fienna Angeline, a transfer student from Mt. San Antonio College, said that after going to other ASI events in the past she was eager to attend the Paint & Sip because she knew it was going to be just as fun. Her creative direction was to paint pink clouds after seeing a tutorial on YouTube while her friend, fellow computer science student, Simon Ly decided to paint an anime character from a show he’s fond of.
Ly said he wanted to go to the Paint & Sip to be more a part of the events on campus as we are collectively coming out of the pandemic’s social distancing orders.
“I haven’t really seen any event like this, I think cause of COVID,” Ly said. “Because my first two years were online virtually, I think it’s a unique event.”
Environmental biology student Chloe Cornejo said they came to the Paint & Sip to join the transfer student campus community, as they transferred recently from Cabrillo College in Northern California and wanted to meet more people.
“I haven’t really made any new friends on campus yet and I transferred last semester,” Cornejo said. “I thought ‘I might as well go to this event because I’m already going to be over there.’”
Barragan and Navarro said that these first events are not only meant to build community between students, but that it’s meant to showcase PolyTransfer as a viable student resource. This is given that the resource aims to support transfer students through one-on-one coaching, academic support and through their mentorship program.
“The event is a great opportunity to relax, enjoy it, have free food and talk with one another and talk to PolyTransfer mentors,” Barragan said.
Additional information about PolyTransfer’s various transfer support programs can be found on their webpage on CPP’s website.
Feature image courtesy of Daniel Tapia