As the university observed Hispanic Heritage Month the NIU College of Business increased its efforts to ensure that Latino students feel welcomed 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 that they graduate better prepared to face a future in the business world. The organization is part of ongoing efforts in the college to better support students of color and more broadly, diversity in all its forms. A similar organization and mentoring program for black students was launched in in 2020.
“The number of Latino students at the university and in the college has been increasing significantly,” noted NIU College of Business Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Student Success Daewoo Park. This fall, he said, the number of Latino s among first-year students increased nearly 40 percent. “Our hope is that the HBSA will help students remain focused and moving in the right direction. We hope it will help them build strong networking relationships and develop communication skills that will serve them well while at NIU and after graduation.”
Even more fundamentally, the organization is creating a sense of home for Latino students, says advisor Ursula Sullivan, who is an associate professor in the Department of Marketing. “Family is an important component of Latino heritage, so we want to foster that through this group,” she says, noting that at least half of Latino students in 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 career.”
Anna Rojas, who serves as president of the organization, says that a desire to find that sense of family and belonging was one of the primary reasons she was drawn to the fledgling 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 that we have to look out for one another and give each other a helping hand. That sense of family and community keeps us united and moving forward.”
Rojas, who transferred to NIU after community college, says that she chose NIU in part because of its large Latino community. “When I would think of any college or university, I never pictured people like me, so it has been great to find a group of people who are all in the same boat as me,” she said.
As that sense of community grows, Park is hopeful that it will lead to new mentoring relationships between upper division students and their younger counter parts. “Our data show that black and Hispanic students, especially first-generation students, don’t have the same academic outcomes as their peers,” Park said. “The data also demonstrates that they are more likely to excel if they can be mentored by a person from a similar background,” Park said.
While the organization will build a sense of community among Latino students, both Park and Sullivan stress that the organization aims to help students develop skills that will help them work and collaborate better with people from all backgrounds.
“Inclusive Excellence (creating a culture that places a premium on cohesive, coherent and collaborative integration of diversity, inclusion and equity in an organization) is recognized as important for the business world, so to succeed our students need to 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 prominent alumni from the college have volunteered to participate in that program and have already been working with the HBSA. At a meeting during homecoming week, several members of the alumni group joined the 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 common cultural foods as membership includes students from several different countries in Latin America including Mexico, Ecuador and El Salvador.
That sort of bonding, and the guidance will prove invaluable, says Dean of the NIU College of Business Balaji Rajagopalan. “Interacting with those alumni will provide our students a powerful foundation upon which life-changing breakthroughs and transformations will most certainly occur,” he said.
For more information on the HBSA, contact the group at niuhbsa@gmail.com.
