A School of Education student was featured in a recent campus news story spotlighting three of UW–Madison’s inaugural rural peer advisers. These advisers are current college students, employed by the College for Rural Wisconsin, who fan out to rural schools and communities to answer questions, provide information, and share first-person insights with students, parents, and high school counselors.
Avery Simpson is a senior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. In the story, she talks about her rural roots and shares how her experience working as a rural peer advisor has been meaningful to her:
A beekeeping future teacher
Senior Avery Simpson says she was “always a little bit of a weird kid” growing up, with a fondness for bugs and insects. As a freshman in high school, she turned that interest into a flourishing hobby, purchasing a beehive with her dad for the family’s rural residence near Brooklyn, Wisconsin, a village of 1,500 people in Dane and Green counties. She bottles the result as “Avery’s American Raw Honey.” At one point, she managed 10 hives and thousands of bees.
Though Simpson grew up just 30 minutes from Madison, she says city life was largely foreign to her before college. Her small-town background helps her understand the concerns of rural students in a way that perhaps only another rural kid could.
“As strange as it seems, I really worried about crossing the streets,” she says, “and I had never been on a city bus.”
Simpson found that some small-town habits die hard. Soon after arriving on campus, she remembers driving around with a friend and having the friend tell her, “Stop waving at every car we go by. They don’t know you.”
Simpson is majoring in elementary education and hopes to teach middle school students one day, ideally in a rural district in Wisconsin. Getting to talk to so many rural students as a peer adviser has been meaningful and given her insights into their challenges, she says.
“We get a lot of questions about finances — How can I make college affordable? Also, they want to know if college is really worth it. I think it is really impactful for them to get to sit down with someone face to face who is already in college and talk about that.”
“I do feel that rural students often get left out of the higher-ed conversation,” Simpson adds. “I think it’s wonderful that they are getting a little bit of a spotlight put on them.”