Student Voices, Our Voices

Students took a genuine interest in MATT.org. They had opinions, solutions and voices that needed to be heard--they only lacked a place of their own to communicate them.

Student Voices by MATT (http://studentvoices.matt.org/), a new website dedicated to bright young minds on both sides of the border, came to life on March 21st at a launch event hosted by the University of the Incarnate Word that included a panel of academics, political leaders, and undergraduate and graduate students from the United States and Mexico.

Student Voices by MATT is an online forum that seeks to create a bridge of cooperation between future leaders in the United States and Mexico. There are sections for opinion articles, academic papers, community events, photo essays and short videos. The team’s goal was to, “make the site as inclusive as possible, so that students could choose from a variety of avenues to share their ideas,” said Student Voices Director, Marissa Gabrysch. While the site was just recently introduced to the general public, it was developed over a period of several months by the dedicated Student Voices team at MATT, which includes Marissa Gabrysch, Leonel Corona, and myself, Sandra Silva, who are a bit of a hodge-podge of talents.

Marissa Gabrysch, a 24 year-old graduate of Baylor University, moved to San Antonio specifi cally to work at MATT because she believes in the cause. Marissa leads the team as the Director of Student Voices. Leonel Corona, a 33 year-old graduate of Universidad Autónoma del Noreste, was recruited from Mexico to be a part of MATT Foundation from its onset. Leonel brought his technical expertise on website management and construction and worked with the others to create a site that was both attractive and functional. And myself, Sandra Silva, a 31 year-old graduate of St. Mary’s University, who joined MATT through my mentor and ex-boss, Lionel Sosa, Executive Director of MATT Foundation. As New Project Manager at MATT, I worked with Marissa to develop and promote Student Voices. While we may have traveled diff erent paths to arrive at MATT, one thing is for certain—we are committed to the success of Student Voices

LISTENING TO STUDENT’S VOICES The idea for Student Voices by MATT was born out of our interactions with university students during the promotional tour for Mexicans & Americans Thinking Together (MATT).

MATT was launched almost a year ago on Cinco de Mayo as a forum for Americans and Mexicans to identify and address the issues facing the United States and Mexico with the intent of finding solutions to the benefit of people on both sides of the border. As the MATT message was being carried to different cities, a trend was emerging.

“We found that our biggest proponents of the MATT mission were students,” said Marissa, and “[they] would listen to our spiel and ask if there was a way we could bring that message to their campus.”

Students took a genuine interest in what MATT was doing. They had opinions, solutions and voices that needed to be heard--they only lacked a place of their own to communicate them.

It was time to develop an extension of the MATT site that would cater to the needs of today’s students, tomorrow’s leaders. Th us began the task of developing a youthful forum where students could apply what they are learning in the classroom and work together to develop, share and cultivate their ideas on the current issues.

BUILDING A SITE FOR TODAY’S YOUTH The concept was simple: build a site with student-generated content that could be sustained by our student members contributing fresh ideas on a variety of issues.

Given that the Student Voices development team is so young, we were able to easily identify our target audience. We chose to target students interested in bilateral relations between the United States and Mexico, political science, international relations, as well as business or communication majors. We also looked for students with a personal vested interest in the two countries--like children of immigrants and bi-cultural American students who love and care about Mexico.

It was important to create a site that was dynamic and captivating, but that was also thought-provoking enough to incite participation. When building the site, the team sought to capture the energy of the students that were their original inspiration.

The architecture of the site was a bit more complicated. “It was challenging to stay as ‘clean’ as possible when building the site,” explains Leonel, “we wanted so much to give the students every feature available on other sites, but we quickly learned that overloading the site with bells and whistles wouldn’t bring us any closer to our goal—to create a platform for clear cut communication.”

We built in options to communicate. Students can vote for their favorite submissions, “comment” on their peer’s posts, or carry their feedback over to a separate forum to engage in lengthy conversations about any topic. Off ering these options was a way to organize and capture the various ways students communicate.

It was important to keep the site simple—if this was going to be a space for students to share their ideas about immigration, culture, economy and politics, it had to be different from the social online communities already in existence.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Student Voices has already registered over 150 members and posts student content from universities in the U.S. and Mexico, like Tufts University, George Mason University, The University of Texas at San Antonio, Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The content to date, much like the students themselves, has been very impressive.

We are happy with the launch and are excited to share this opportunity with more students, so we plan to take Student Voices onto many more campuses with a university tour that will hit all the major university cities in the U.S. and Mexico.

Join Student Voices at http://studentvoices.matt.org.