As the university observed Hispanic Heritage Month, the NIU College of Business stepped up its efforts to ensure Latino students feel welcome and at home.
HSBA officially launched this fall to support Latino students and ensure they graduate prepared to face a future in the business world.
Officially launched this fall, the Hispanic Business Student Association (HBSA) was created to support Latino students and ensure they graduate better prepared to face a future in the business world. The organization is part of ongoing efforts at the college to better support students of color and more broadly, diversity in all its forms. A similar organization and mentoring program for students of color was launched in 2020.
“The number of Latino students in university and college has grown significantly,” noted NIU College of Business Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Student Success Daewoo Park. This fall, he said, the number of Latinos among freshmen increased nearly 40 percent. “Our hope is that HBSA will help students stay focused and move in the right direction. We hope it will help them build strong networking relationships and develop communication skills that will serve them well during their time at NIU and after graduation.”
Even more fundamentally, the organization is creating a sense of home for Latino students, says adviser Ursula Sullivan, who is an associate professor in the Department of Marketing. “Family is an important component of Latino heritage, so we want to cultivate that through this group,” she says, noting that at least half of the Latino students at the college are first-generation students. “If we can develop a sense of belonging, I believe it will help us better retain these students and help them succeed in the classroom and in their careers.”
Anna Rojas, who serves as the organization’s president, says the desire to find that sense of family and belonging was one of the main reasons she was drawn to the new organization.
“Our culture believes that we are better together than alone, and I hope we can build on that,” says Rojas, a senior majoring in business administration with a minor in Latino and Latin American Studies. Latinos are very family oriented; we have always been taught to take care of each other and give each other a helping hand. That sense of family and community keeps us together and moving forward.”
Rojas, who transferred to NIU after community college, says she chose NIU in part because of its large Latino community. “When I think of any college or university, I never envision people like me, so it’s been great to find a group of people who are all in the same boat as me,” she said.
As this sense of community grows, Park hopes it will lead to new mentoring relationships between upper-division students and their younger peers. “Our data shows that students of color and Hispanics, especially first-generation students, do not have the same academic outcomes as their peers,” Park said. “The data also shows that they are more likely to excel if they can be mentored by a person with a similar background,” Park said.
While the organization will build a sense of community among Latino students, both Park and Sullivan emphasize that the organization aims to help students develop skills that will help them work and collaborate better with people of all backgrounds.
“Inclusive excellence (creating a culture that prioritizes the cohesive, coherent and collaborative integration of diversity, inclusion and equality in an organization) is recognized as important to the business world, so to succeed our students must graduate prepared to collaborate with people of all backgrounds,” says Park.
To help students understand the importance of working with people of diverse backgrounds, the college has also launched a Hispanic Alumni Mentoring Program. Twenty distinguished alumni from the college have volunteered to participate in that program and are already working with HBSA. At a meeting during homecoming week, several members of the alumni group joined students to discuss their experiences with diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. They also stuck around for a taco bar, which gave students an opportunity to enjoy shared cultural foods since the membership includes students from several different countries in Latin America, including Mexico, Ecuador and El Salvador.
That kind of connection and guidance will be invaluable, says NIU College of Business Dean Balaji Rajagopalan. “Interacting with those graduates will provide our students with a strong foundation upon which life-changing breakthroughs and transformations will occur,” he said.
For more information on HBSA, contact the group at [email protected].
