Who and Why
Congratulations to the Class of 2012!!!
The opportunity to attend Brown University is not an accomplishment achieved solely through individual efforts. There is a history behind each person's journey to this campus, and students of color have a particularly rich history of individual sacrifice and collective struggle that paved their way to Brown. From the challenge of breaking ethnic, racial, or other barriers to contemporary issues of racism, students of color at Brown possess a unique history of growth and development. Each year, this history, growth, and collective struggle is explored in a pre-orientation program.
The Third World Transition Program welcomes new students to Brown and provides an introduction to the support structures and resources available to them. Another focus of the program is an exploration of systems of oppression that exist in our society today, including racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and heterosexism. Through an examination of the problems that divide our society, we seek to break down the barriers that separate us in order to build understanding and community. We also call on all participants to reconsider their history and aspects of their identity in order to better understand themselves and the similarities and differences between themselves and their peers. Participants are also introduced to the activism, resilience, and legacy of Third World community at Brown. The discussions, workshops, and events of TWTP not only welcome students and build support networks, but also cultivate a campus culture that seeks to bring about a more equitable and just society.
TWTP began in 1968 as the Transitional Summer Program, a six-week program that focused on academic adjustment for incoming Third World students. The program was meant to prepare students from disempowered communities for the academic rigors of an Ivy League University. With the University's acknowledgement of the social inequalities that Third World students faced along their journey to Brown and would continue to face at a predominantly white institution, the Transitional Summer Program became the Third World Transition Program (TWTP) in 1975. TWTP has long since prepared students for the social challenges they may face at Brown while providing participants with a space to discover and understand themselves as they enter Brown.
The Office of the Dean of the College and the Office of Campus Life and Student Services sponsors the Third World Transition Program. It is run each year by the Director of the Third World Center/Associate Dean of the College, two TWTP student coordinators, and a network of approximately 40 undergraduates. These students are Minority Peer Counselors (MPCs) and Friends of the MPC Program. Together the MPCs and MPC Friends assist in facilitating workshops and doing behind the scene work to keep TWTP running smoothly.
For more than 200 participants each year, TWTP has become a celebration of culture, history, and pluralism within the community of color. It gives first year students from a variety of backgrounds the chance to begin to explore their own unique experiences, share their commonalties, learn from their differences, and build a more unified community at Brown.
