Lateral Entry

Each Class is selected in the spring of their first year and then inducted in a pan-Periclean ceremony typically in the first weeks of April. Lateral entry is where a student (or students) is (are) accepted into the program after the official invitations have been sent and the Induction Ceremony has been completed.

Lateral entry exists for several reasons. First, with few exceptions each Class of Pericleans has experienced some level of attrition and has felt a need to replenish its numbers. Though we make every attempt to broadcast the opportunity to become a Periclean Scholar, there are always some students who only become aware and interested in the program after their Class has been selected. Thirdly, there have numerous times in our history when special circumstances arose making adding new Class members been clearly beneficial.

This has always been a Class decision made in consultation with the Mentor and the Director. The Class decides the timing and more importantly the process.

There are a number of ways Classes have experienced dealing with lateral entries. In many cases, Class members are approached by non-Periclean students (frequently classmates, friends, or co-members of other affiliation groups on campus) who show an interest in the program or the particular issue being addressed by the Class. As frequently the case will be that Class members will seek out recruits through this same kind of networking. A third method is through active recruitment on campus using various social networking mechanisms (e.g., Facebook, posters on campus, and so on).

Beginning this year the answer to that question is yes.

Some past Classes have had lateral entry from other class years. Though many Classes in the past have had “friends of the Class of 20XX” that were an additional support system for the Class and were from various graduation years, the Class of 2010 has had a lateral entry system –now being phased out- whereby that Class Mentor worked with small groups of students who were “officially” Pericleans. The Class of 2012 also has a lateral entry student. To be clear, lateral entry of students not in the same Class year is being phased out.

The responsibility of every Periclean Class is make efforts to sustain the partnerships they created as undergraduates long after graduation, and this can be accomplished in various ways including having younger students act as “friends of Pericleans Class of 20XX.” After graduation the onus is on the alumni Pericleans to maintain contact with each other, remaining undergraduate “friends,” their partner(s), their Mentor and the program Director in order to meaningfully sustain their initiatives and partnerships. Additionally, the program is now intentionally “recycling countries/regions of focus (e.g., the 2016’s are going back to Honduras, also the focus of the ‘07’s, and the 2017’s will reconnect with Namibia, the country of focus for the ‘06’s), thereby providing pathways to maintain contacts and partnerships from one generation of Pericleans to the next.

This is a Class decision, but the history is that lateral entry students are asked to do remedial work about the country of focus and the issue(s) being worked on by the Class.

The best-case scenario is to have lateral entry students come in as juniors, but there have been exceptional cases in the past where lateral entries have started as late as first semester seniors. The later the student joins a Class, of course, the more remedial work should be required.

Yes. This means that they take all of the PER classes, are active in their Class, and thus appear on the Class roster for the Leaders of the 21st Century program and on the official graduation day program.