The Consortium is fortunate to bring on a new intern this fall—Delphie Backs, an Elsie Hillman Honors Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh.
Backs, who is planning a career in elementary education, started work with us earlier this month. Although she’s still getting acquainted, she’s also beginning to focus on a couple different aspects of our work, including our mentoring program and our work around equity.
Backs comes to us with a background as a youth mentor, which she counts as one of her most rewarding experiences and one that contributed to her interest in eventually teaching 3rd or 4th grade.
As a high school student in York, Pa., she took on mentees through the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program in her community and seemed each year to be assigned third graders, she said, adding that she really liked the age group. “They’re becoming more independent thinkers at that age. They’re thinking and understanding so much more than you even expect.”
Backs said it was rewarding to see how her mentees grew, recalling how one became so much better in reading and managed to overcome a lot of her shyness and anxiety. By the end of their year together, ‘It was really awesome to see her come out of her shell and gain some self-advocacy skills,” she said.
Since starting college, Backs has continued volunteer work as a Pitt Enrich Tutor, both one-on-one with students and in small groups at Pittsburgh Faison K-5 in Homewood.
In addition to her volunteer work, Backs also brings classroom experience from a kindergarten teaching practicum at Pitt’s Falk Laboratory school.