Purdue Polytechnic’s Diversity Advisory Council (DAC), originally established in April and brought together around the new PEAK (Polytechnic Excellence Accelerating Knowledge) program, is set to meet again on Friday, October 18.
Donzel Leggett, a Purdue Polytechnic alumnus who was an Academic All-American football player during his undergraduate years, who then returned to achieve a Masters in industrial technology, joined DAC specifically because he sensed promise behind the PEAK program that wasn’t present in prior college endeavors.
“[In the past,] I felt that the college was really just trying to solve a social perception problem—trying to put a band-aid on diversity concerns without addressing root causes,” Leggett, a long-time vice president at General Mills who recently became the principal at Destiny Development Delta consulting, stated.
“With PEAK, I felt that they’d come back to me with a real plan, and they were committed this time.”
PEAK is designed to provide Purdue Polytechnic students from underrepresented backgrounds with a support network that extends throughout their time at Purdue. Rather than a solely recruitment-focused framework, made only to get students into Purdue, PEAK’s goal is to give students connections that enrich their experience in higher education and prepare them for careers after college.
In April, fellow DAC board member Tayo Adesanya (electrical engineering technology alumnus and cofounder/CEO of Lola Vision Systems) told the newsroom that the council’s aim is “to support future students who might otherwise be overlooked or discouraged from pursuing impactful careers.”
The PEAK program is the mechanism the council will use to seek that goal. Randy Sergesketter, a fellow industrial technology alumnus and council member as well as a long-time senior vice president at John Deere recently told the Purdue for Life Foundation: “the purpose of PEAK is to help break down barriers that hinder the retention and success of students who are often not typically equipped to benefit from higher education.”
One strategic goal for the upcoming DAC meeting is for members to strategize about how to incorporate the Purdue Polytechnic High School system, based in and around Indianapolis, into the PEAK model. By becoming a presence in the educations of PPHS students early and often, DAC has an opportunity to fulfill Leggett’s wish of holding institutions accountable for the success of underrepresented students in the long term.
“We can’t just be trying to recruit these students and do nothing else for them,” Leggett said. “You’ve got to go beyond that—beyond hoping that people just show up at Purdue and have a good experience. You have to create programs that make students feel like they belong. It’s about making sure they see a future for themselves and feel supported throughout their journey.”
DAC hopes to expand the PEAK program’s opportunities to provide the kind of “tailored support,” as Sergesketter described it, that can show these new, often first-generation college students a path forward through Purdue which also sets them up for good careers in the future.
“The best way to make this program work at this point is to set objective standards that we can use as benchmarks, and to back those up with action,” Leggett stated. “What is the data showing us about how these students are coming along? Where are we today across key performance indicators? And what are the goals we need to set to hold ourselves accountable for the future? We want to make sure we know this info for the sake of every student that comes through the PEAK program.”
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