The Bartlett Academic Success Center has a sense of space and flow that’s unlike any other building on the University of Arizona campus. As part of the Student Success District, a renovation and construction project that opened to students in 2022, BASC was purpose-built to house student support services.
One of these services is the Thrive Center, and although it existed before BASC, its unconventional approach fits perfectly with the building’s unconventional architecture.
Like all campus organizations, the Thrive Center’s mission is to provide students with the resources they need to succeed in their college lives. Its financial wellness initiative provides one-on-one meetings and custom presentations that explain financial basics to students, its First Cats program focuses on first-generation college students and its peer mentoring program pairs students with upperclassmen to discuss their problems. Other programs include The 50, AGAVE and UA Hispanic Alumni Scholars.
But instead of being separate entities, these programs often overlap. Although everyone at the Thrive Center has their own area of expertise, the organization is “all hands on deck,” W. Patrick Bryan, the center’s associate director of peer mentoring, said.
Partly, this comes from necessity. “With budget cuts that have happened successively, we’ve then found ways to kind of still integrate that work and still support students through the other programs that we have,” Bryan said.
But it also reflects the organization’s philosophy that students’ academic, financial and social struggles are all interrelated. Alexei Marquez, Ph.D., is the assistant director of education and initiatives at Financial Wellness, and many of the programs she helps coordinate operate from this perspective.
This year, that includes Accessible Kitchen Teach & Shares. This program entails drop-in workshops where students learn how to make a simple microwaveable meal using ingredients available at the Campus Pantry food bank. “Then we do the financial breakdown of it,” Marquez said. “So if you use all of the Campus Pantry points this week, this meal would be 97 cents.” The next one will be available on April 20 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
The Thrive Center also offers Thrive Treks, which are short trips where peer mentors walk with students to on-campus buildings like the Main Library or Campus Recreation and tour the facilities.
“The hardest thing to get students to do is to actually walk in,” Bryan said. “Once they’ve done that, then they already know, they feel comfortable and they just come back.”
This service is one of many ways that the Thrive Center directs students to other resources, which reflects its goal as a first step.
“Our goal is not to keep them in Thrive,” Bryan said. “It’s to get them exposed and help them find their place, and then hopefully they’re connecting beyond that.”
Marquez used Pixar’s 2006 film “Cars” as an analogy. “Lightning McQueen ends up in this small little town, but it has everything that he needed before going to a bigger town,” Marquez said. “We are that first town that has the gas station, that has the meals, everything you would need. But we ultimately want the student to go on to that bigger town, which is their degree.”
But Victoria Gonzalez, a UA junior studying psychology and journalism, isn’t ready to move on to the next town yet. She’s the vice president of the Disney Club, the creative chair of The Poets of Tucson, the secretary of the College of Fine Arts Ambassadors and a member of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority.
To Gonzalez, the most helpful aspect of the Thrive Center was the peer mentoring she received in her freshman and sophomore years. “You do a meeting once every two weeks with them, and they kind of go over grades with you, if you have any questions, if you need any support with anything,” Gonzalez said.
She quickly became friends with her mentor, who is her upperclassman by one year. The two of them talked every day, which sometimes made their official meetings every two weeks awkward when they had nothing new to talk about. She’s still friends with her former peer mentor today — and she still attends Thrive Center events.
“My favorite event of Thrive is always the Fall Harvest. It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and they have a Thanksgiving meal for all the students,” Gonzalez said. “It’s always really delicious, and it’s so much fun to see everybody.”
That sense of community is what keeps her coming back, and she joined Alpha Epsilon Phi last fall for similar reasons.
“I like being in the sorority because it gives me those sisterhood connections,” she said. “But it’s also like, Thrive is where I started, and at Thrive I have a lot of other friends, and I think it’s important to keep both of those things alive.”
The Bartlett Academic Success Center is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday through Thursday and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays and is located on 1435 E. Fourth St.
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