Matt Rosenstein (right) and a Pathway friend in the bleachers at a Bruins baseball game.
Alexis and Rosenstein, who is now a fourth-year student at UCLA combining a Jewish studies major with pre-med classes, discovered a shared passion for playing basketball and have spent countless hours shooting hoops together. But more significantly, Rosenstein said, his friendship with Alexis has forever altered his perspective on people with conditions that we think make them “different.”
“I’ve realized that we’re all the same as people,” said the UCLA student.
To share this eye-opening realization with fellow Bruins when he arrived on campus as a freshman in 2009, Rosenstein took on a leadership role in UCLA's Circle of Friends, which had been established two years before as the first college chapter of a nationwide organization with 100 high school chapters. Today, with 25 members strong, UCLA’s Circle of Friends has forged a relationship with Pathway at UCLA Extension, a two-year certificate program for students with intellectual and other developmental disabilities — primarily autism, Down’s Syndrome and cerebral palsy — that offers a blend of educational, social and vocational experiences on and around campus.
Rosenstein and his Circle co-directors — Sean Cantwell, a fourth-year physiological sciences major, and second-year neuroscience major Andrew Rosenstein, his brother, who followed him to UCLA two years ago — work together to enlist other UCLA students committed to forging genuine relationships with Pathway students.
Circle of Friends volunteers and Pathway students on a visit to the Getty Museum.
“We teach a compassionate approach — that positive reinforcement is really the way to go in terms of helping the students really be the best that they can,” said Rosenstein. “The main thing we tell [volunteers] is to make sure you try your hardest to see these Pathway students as really no different as you. See yourself in them. We all have different abilities and different challenges.”
Circle friends, with the permission of their professors, sometimes invite their Pathway pals to attend classes with them. Rosenstein recalled taking a Pathway friend to his archaeology class last year. “He asked the most incredible questions. He was so engaged in the material and so excited to be there that it made me — and I think everybody else in the class — think, ‘Wow! Here’s someone who has cerebral palsy, yet is as good as or better than us at engaging with an upper-division archaeology class.’”
Witnessing his friend’s excitement prompted the creation last fall of “Three Pillars, One University,” a series of symposiums dubbed for UCLA’s tripartite mission of teaching, research and service. The program is conducted under the auspices of the UCLA Volunteer Center, where Rosenstein is one of eight "fellows" who help plan programming that engages student volunteers campuswide. Three Pillars aims to give Pathway students, “a front row seat on all the amazing stuff that happens here,” Rosenstein said.
Dr. Isaac Yang (right) greets a Pathway student during a Three Pillars, One University symposium.
Three Pillars has been a success with Pathways students and faculty volunteers alike, among them Dr. Isaac Yang, a neurosurgeon who is helping to lead the development of a vaccine against brain cancer. “He introduced himself as ‘Isaac’ and was incredibly kind to the students,” Rosenstein recalled. The encounter went so well that Yang has taken part in every symposium since and even serves the event’s faculty adviser. The next symposium, coming up on Tuesday, Feb. 26, will feature talks by history professor Teofilo Ruiz, physics and astronomy professor Katsushi Arisasaka and three other faculty.
Circle of Friends, which was the subject of an NBC Nightly News “Making a Difference” segment in 2010, gave Rosenstein a national award in 2011 for his innovative work at UCLA. The award led to a proclamation by the City of Santa Monica: "The Circle of Friends is an amazing group of people, young and old, bound by a common purpose: building bonds of friendship that allow us to transcend our differences," then-Mayor Richard Bloom said.
“The students that I’ve gotten to meet through Circle of Friends have changed my life … a million times over,” said Rosenstein, who is hoping to go to medical school after his graduation this June. He envisions himself incorporating all that he has learned in Circle to his future as a physician. Last summer, he began to explore that terrain by interviewing doctors about their relationships with patients and self-publishing a book, “The Service Minded Physician” with several co-authors.
“At the end of the day, we’re all just people,” the book begins. “We walk through life together, mentoring each other.”