Behind the Pitt network that’s helping rural students adjust to urban life

Kaia Abramski came to Pitt from a Westmoreland County town where a four-year college recruiter had never set foot in her high school. As most of her graduating class headed into the trades, Abramski enrolled in engineering because it was one of the few technical fields she knew by name.

She arrived to find lecture halls holding 200 students - much larger than her entire high school class of 135 - and classmates who had taken college-level courses as early as ninth grade.

"It made me realize how much my high school didn't have, and how I felt underqualified compared to some people," said Abramski (pictured).

For students like Kaia from rural Pennsylvania, the transition to Pitt often means two adjustments at once - navigating a new city and bridging academic preparation gaps that weren't available back home. Pitt has built a dedicated network to help them make that leap.

Among the programs anchoring that work is the Partners for Rural Student Success Impact and Mobility (PRSSIM) Project, a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative running through 2027. In 2024, the program's first year, rural student first-year retention and enrollment grew across Pitt's population and campuses, according to project data.

A key figure driving that enrollment is Daryl Burleigh, a rural recruiter in the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid who grew up in rural northeast Pennsylvania. He travels the state's rural communities to introduce prospective students to Pitt and ease the anxiety of considering a university in the middle of a city.

He said students coming from small towns can find Pittsburgh's scale disorienting at first.

"There's a bit of sensory overload that can happen when you're used to small towns and fields and all that, and suddenly you've got tall buildings and traffic and noises and sounds and smells and stuff that you're not used to," Burleigh said.

Part of what Burleigh tells prospective students is that campus and the Oakland neighborhood look nothing like the Pittsburgh they may have seen on a trip downtown; trees, plants and flowers abound and Schenley Park is only steps from class.

He said, "for me, it's like the Goldilocks zone" - not too urban, not too rural, close enough to green space that the transition feels manageable.

Once rural students arrive on campus, the Office of the Provost's Institutional Research and Analytics team identifies eligible students and connects them with PRSSIM.

For qualifying students, the program provides academic coaching, tutoring, mentoring, and career and major exploration, alongside financial literacy resources, cultural programming and internship funding for students at regional campuses, where paid positions can be difficult to find.

Abramski was one of them: PRSSIM's career development support gave her resume coaching, mock interviews and individualized professional preparation. By fall of her junior year, the program itself had offered her an internship helping to build PRSSIM's research infrastructure. She still works with the team today, as she finishes her senior year and prepares to graduate this spring.

PRSSIM is also working to remove specific academic barriers its first-year data identified. One of the most common, project lead Larissa Ciuca said, is a $25 math placement test many rural students were quietly skipping. The omission can land students in lower-level courses and even delay their graduation.

So, the team is piloting fee waivers at Pitt-Johnstown this summer alongside targeted preparation modules. The internship program is also growing, from 12 students in its first cycle to nearly 20 across all four campuses now.

With the grant running through 2027, co-PI Vanessa Hadley said the team is already considering next steps. Ideas include building a rural resource library and planning a second annual symposium for fall 2026.

The team is also growing the Pitt Commons community group, which works to fill information gaps between rural students, faculty and alumni across all four campuses. For Abramski, who switched her major to data analytics in her second semester, the biggest obstacle was not knowing the field she wanted to study existed.

"I didn't really know that data analytics was an option," she said. "I figured it was just math or computer science - there wasn't another option that combines skills from those two."

Ciuca, who also serves associate director for University Undergraduate Advising, noted that rural students don't arrive as a single story. The most persistent misconception, she said, is that their preparation gaps reflect limited potential.

"It's not that their ability is different," Ciuca said. "It's more about their access, because of where they came from."

Hadley, program coordinator for student success, said many students arrive with pressures invisible in an application. Family obligations or financial need can make staying in school harder than getting there.

"A lot of rural students, just because they come from a close-knit experience with their families - they might not necessarily see 'I.' They see 'we' first," she said.

For many of the students Ciuca works with, the decision to come to Pitt meant choosing a path that few people around them had taken, or even imagined for them.

"I think that takes a certain level of courage," she said, "especially when it's not what they've been raised around, or if nobody in their family has particularly taken that path."

Pennsylvania students, find out if you qualify for PRSSIM by visiting the project's website.

Photography By Aimee Obidzinski