They love their small-town roots: These UW–Madison undergrads advise other rural students on higher ed 

McKenna Riley first realized she was a little different from some of her peers at UW–Madison when she mentioned the annual FFA donkey basketball fundraiser game at her high school that pits teachers against alumni — and yes, they ride actual donkeys. Other traditions left her classmates equally wide-eyed, like the Spirit Week “Kiss A Calf” contest and “Drive Your Tractor to School Day.” 

“My friends are always fascinated by these stories,” she says. 

Riley loved growing up in a small town in Wisconsin — she’s from Rockland, a village of about 750 people in eastern La Crosse County. She also loves attending a Big Ten university with more than 50,000 students. She melds these two worlds as a rural peer adviser for UW–Madison’s “College for Rural Wisconsin.”

The relatively new effort through the Division of Enrollment Management works to increase college access for rural, farm and small-town students in Wisconsin, regardless of whether they ultimately choose to apply to UW–Madison or elsewhere. The university is part of the nationwide Small Town and Rural Students (STARS) College Network. 

“We’re really about looking at the state holistically and saying, Who needs to be served? Who are the students that don’t get a lot of access to higher education or outreach from higher education institutions?” says Jennifer Blazek, program director for the College for Rural Wisconsin. “It’s about building the capacity in the state around college-going for our rural and small-town students.” 

Traditionally, many universities and colleges invite prospective students to come to them, which might not be financially or logistically feasible for some rural and small-town students, says Blazek, who raised dairy cows in high school on her family’s farm near Bangor, Wisconsin. 

“We’ve essentially flipped the script,” she says. “While we can’t bring the whole campus to rural students, we can bring a lot of the materials and the mentoring and the support to them. That way, instead of thinking they need to visit five or 10 campuses, they can perhaps make better-informed decisions on where to utilize their resources and time.” 

Rural peer advisers are current college students 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. The College for Rural Wisconsin will employ four rural peer advisers from UW–Madison this academic year and one each from UW–River Falls and Mid-State Technical College, which has multiple campuses in Wisconsin. 

McKenna Riley, Avery Simpson and Jack Taylor all served last year as inaugural rural peer advisers. All three UW–Madison students are returning to the role this year. Here’s a little more about each of them: 

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.” 

Zooming in from a cornfield 

When she can’t be on campus for a meeting, senior McKenna Riley sometimes logs in from a cornfield just outside of Madison. She can often be found there as a student researcher with Professor Jean-Michel Ané’s corn lab. The work isn’t related to her career goals — she aspires to be a pediatric oncologist — but it’s important to her, nonetheless. 

“All I remember growing up were cornfields,” Riley says. “Being a corn researcher is a little way I can give back to my community.” 

Riley’s hometown of Rockland “has one stop sign and the classic essentials — a bar, a gas station, and a tiny park,” she says. “And, as the name implies, there is a single big rock.” (A “monument to nature,” according to the village’s history.) 

Growing up, Riley says she knew of only one person who attended UW–Madison. That’s part of the appeal of being a rural peer adviser. 

“I hope to be able to give the sort of help to students and families that I wish I had got as a kid,” she says. “I didn’t know a whole lot of people who went to big colleges, so I’m eager to share what I’ve learned about going to college to anyone who wants to listen.” 

Her rural bona fides include a love of classic country music, especially T.G. Sheppard and Johnny Cash, two of her grandfather’s favorite singers and mainstays on her homework soundtrack. 

“I’ll open up Spotify, hit play and go to work. It just reminds me of home.”  

A ‘Jack’ of all trades 

The joke about junior Jack Taylor among his fellow peer advisers is that he has so many varied interests, he can find a way to make a personal connection with almost any high school student anywhere. He gladly accepts the challenge. 

“I hope that in talking about my interests, I’m able to show kids that no matter where you come from, you don’t have to let it define you,” says Taylor, who grew up in Princeton, a city of about 1,200 people in central Wisconsin. 

Taylor is vice president of the university’s anthropology student organization and a member of the Young Progressives group on campus. Last year, he also participated in ceramics club, served as poetry editor for Illumination Journal, a student publication, and volunteered for hunger and homelessness causes. (“Quite frankly, I overbooked,” he says.) 

Taylor attended a high school so small, his graduating class had just 20 students. For higher-level courses, he drove to Ripon College. 

“That’s something I talk about when I’m on panels,” says Taylor, who is pursuing a double major in anthropology and landscape and urban studies. “Small high schools are wonderful in a lot of ways, but they can leave you feeling a little unprepared for college if you don’t have access to a lot of AP courses. I talk with rural students about how they can fill those gaps.” 

There’s a lot of potential in a rural background, Taylor says, and he wants rural students to know that and be proud of that. 

“I also want them to know that just because you come from a certain place, it doesn’t mean you have to be a certain way. You get to decide what your background means to you.”