“I’ve been in and out of foster care since I was born,” Cook, a Roseville High School senior, said.

Angelique Day, a visiting research specialist for the MSU School of Social Work, helped start Foster Youth Alumni Services to help youth aging out of foster care to transition to university life. MSU has 209 students who lived in foster care.

“The goal of the camp is to provide assimilation experience,” she said. “(Foster youth) don’t have someone in their lives that can walk them through what they have to do in their last year of high school. How many of us, at 18 years old, felt like we had the skills to completely take care of ourselves?”

Jim Hennessey, the director of the Child Welfare Resource Center in the School of Social Work, is co-running the camp with social work clerical aide Holly Ball. He said the students would see presentations on admissions, financial aid, scheduling and budgeting.

He said they also would write personal statements for college applications and work on résumés for mock job interviews.

John Seita, an associate professor of social work, said the university offers former foster youth mentoring and help with navigating the financial aid system.

“The most important challenge they deal with is they don’t have extended support,” he said. “We try to support them in a variety of ways so they have someone to turn to when they’re in a crisis.”

Cook said she isn’t worried about facing college without a family to support her.

“They’re either there or they’re not,” she said. “It’s my future.”

Day said MSU offers scholarships to former foster youth, but they don’t cover full tuition. She said the university offers other supportive services, including help getting work study and figuring out where to go over university breaks. She said students also are paired with anonymous community members who send them care packages during finals week.

She said Western Michigan University leads the state in services to former foster youth, because it offers full tuition scholarships and employs three full-time campus coaches to guide students.

“We certainly have a long way to go as far as building our supports,” Day said.

She said MSU has the only program using older former foster youth to help new arrivals transition to college life. All but one of the eight camp counselors lived in foster care. Wesley Patton, a counselor and social work senior who entered foster care at 12, said former foster youth can make it with the right help.

“It’s something that I stand for, a way that I feel like I want to give back,” he said.

Florensio Hernandez, an MSU admissions counselor who gave a presentation to the students at the camp about how to apply to college, said he was impressed by them.

“These kids weren’t what you think of with foster kids, quiet, sobbing,” he said. “These kids are pretty self-motivated.”