As Ohio State students finished the first week of classes Friday, four second-year high school students from Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men in Chicago toured OSU’s main campus as part of a program that enables young, black males to visit colleges and universities.

The four young men — Lashawn Brown, Jacob Mitchell, Bobby Williams and Steven Laster — were accompanied by their teacher, Paul Rivera, an OSU alumnus and doctoral candidate, as the Office of Minority Affairs gave them an overview of opportunities available to students. They then toured the dorms, attended a business school open house and visited buildings such as the Union, RPAC and William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library.

Campus tours are meant to give potential students an idea of what OSU has to offer, said Donya Gibson, program coordinator in the Office of Undergraduate Recruitment and Development. “We want to get the message across as early as possible. The goal is higher education, whether it’s Ohio State or whether it’s somewhere else,” she said.

Urban Prep, a non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Tim King and a group of African-American education, business and civic leaders, strives “to provide a comprehensive, high-quality college preparatory education to young men that results in our graduates succeeding in college,” according to its website.

“At Urban Prep, they’re basically writing the book on how you educate young men of color,” Rivera said.

There are three branches of the school in Chicago, and the visiting group was from the second campus in East Garfield Park, which opened in 2009.

As the first generation of future seniors, the four boys see Urban Prep as a positive influence that changed their study habits and prospective goals, they said.

“I would like to hang out a lot at one of my cousin’s, and he started doing stuff that he wasn’t supposed to be doing and he got shot, and I didn’t want that to be me,” Williams said.

Rivera wanted the boys to visualize a future goal more clearly and get a taste of the university that challenged him to open himself up to new experiences, he said.

“Our school is 100 percent African-American males, which is great, because we can really meet the needs of that group, but the world isn’t, and they need to be exposed to different ways of life,” he said. “This school, even though it’s in Ohio, has an international feel.”

Rivera hopes the boys take two things from this visit, he said.

“One, that they would actually have a concrete example of college in their minds, so when we’re working them hard and challenging them and saying the goal is a four-year college, they know what that actually looks like now. Second, be inspired to kind of challenge themselves and push themselves to work harder in the classroom and outside the classroom so they can experience things that would be new for them, like going to a college like Ohio State,” he said.

The four visitors each said they see themselves participating in the OSU community in the future.