It’s been years since Carole Lapidos was a middle school student, but she hasn’t forgotten just how hard it can be.

“Listening to cattiness and the name-calling, we realized it’s really difficult to be a girl in middle school,” she said. “So we decided to do something about it.”

Lapidos saw that these students needed guidance — from someone they could really look up to. That’s when she got the idea to bring female students from the University of Michigan into these middle schools, giving the preteens real-life role models.

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