Tim Wahl is all about opportunity. As a businessman, he’s used it to gain entry into different ventures. As a part-time guest lecturer at California State University, Northridge, he’s developed curriculums around it, like an interview seminar for students. Now, Wahl is working on an opportunity that could marry a group of kids in green with Matador red.

Businessman Tim Wahl is a guest lecturer at CSUN’s College of Business and Economics.

Along with being a member of the College of Business and Economics’ advisory board, Wahl is also a member of the board of directors of the Green Dot Public School system. The mission of Green Dot, a collection of Los Angeles charter schools, states that it “is committed to changing the landscape of public education in Los Angeles so that every child can go to a good school and be successful in college, leadership, and life.”

While lecturing at CSUN, Wahl realized his work with both secondary and higher education had the potential for more synergy.

“As I became more involved with CSUN,” Wahl recalled, “I looked at the needs of the students at Northridge and looked at what the background of the students were. It seemed to me that I had an overlap between the needs of Green Dot and CSUN students.” He realized he just needed to get his kids in the Green Dot schools onto a college campus to really experience it, instead of hearing about it second-hand. And then he made it happen.

Starting last November, Wahl began bringing Green Dot kids to the CSUN campus by the bus full. He chose 10th grade students because they were the students who had the most to gain (and time to create action) from the visits. When the students arrive on campus, they are given a tour and firsthand account of what campus life is like by groups such as the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) and Student Outreach.

“[The Green Dot students] have been really positive,” said Jaclyn Kietzman ’05 (Communications), M.A. ’10 (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies), a member of the student outreach group who has spoken to the students. “They were all eager and excited, and when I have an eager and excited audience, it makes me eager and excited!” Kietzman uses her enthusiasm to go over the requirements of getting into CSUN before starting to field questions from the students.

Jaclyn Kietzman, pre-admissions counselor for Student Outreach and Recruitment. Photo by Lee Choo.

“Common questions are ‘What’s college really like?’ ‘Tell me about student housing and the dorms,’ ‘Can I pick my own roommate?’ ‘How do I pay for college?’ ‘What type of scholarships does CSUN offer?’—those are big ones.”

Big questions indeed, but ones Wahl believes can be answered later. For now, it’s all about demystifying college for the students and showing them how great an opportunity college is, specifically CSUN.

“Many of the students at Green Dot schools would be natural candidates to apply to and be invited to attend CSUN,” Wahl states matter-of-factly. “It just made perfect sense to marry them.”

COBAE, EOP, Student Outreach