ABSTRACT

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of South Florida (USF). USF is a large, urban, community-engaged public university that provides STEM education to a diverse student body. Over its 5-year duration, this project will fund 95 annual scholarships to 52 students who are pursuing master's degrees in environmental engineering, geosciences, and biology. Students will receive 1.5- to 2-year scholarships. The project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields by linking scholarships with important supporting activities including mentoring, research experiences, community engagement, and participation in discipline-specific conferences and workshops. Scholars will be assigned faculty mentors and academic advisors, who will supervise student participation in project activities and assure that scholars are achieving important transition connections. The project will also support significant informal interactions between scholars and alumni, and among scholars within their cohorts, to improve retention, student integration, and professional networking. Of principal significance, this project will enhance interdisciplinary training that links geosciences, biology, and engineering to understand and co-design solutions to nitrogen pollution of the environment, while teaching scholars the importance of engaging local affected communities in their professional work. Because USF has a high population of underrepresented students and receives a large number of graduate applications from students of limited means, this project has the potential to broaden participation in STEM fields and to advance understanding of how mentoring, workforce development, and transition connections promote the retention and graduation of this student population.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving graduate students with demonstrated financial need. Three principle objectives will guide the project team. First, to prepare graduate students for STEM employment by providing a broad scope of curricular and co-curricular opportunities, team-building activities, and professional development initiatives. Second, to foster capacity for interdisciplinary problem solving, workforce readiness, and professional socialization. Third, to analyze the effectiveness of activities implemented in this project on recruitment, retention, student success, academic and career pathways, and degree attainment. Student persistence in STEM fields is generally understood to be adversely affected by transition barriers. Yet it can be bolstered through strong mentoring that provides focused interventions, through professional development activities and research experiences that stimulate interest in STEM, and through initiatives and cultural wealth that professionally socialize students to their disciplinary areas while allowing them to maintain cultural identities. However, little is known about how these factors affect low-income students in graduate degree programs. Accordingly, this project will investigate the effectiveness of activities designed to strengthen mentoring relationships, professional development, and transition connections for improving graduate students' success and transitions into STEM career pathways. This investigation will reveal whether students who succeed (high GPAs, persistence, conference participation, degree completion, post-graduation placement) and who report feelings of accomplishment, also report high levels of cultural wealth, measured as various forms of capital. It will also identify specific mentoring, workforce-development, and transition-connection activities that correspond with actual indicators and perceived feelings of student success. This project has the potential to advance understanding of how a broad scope of activities and cultural attributes promote persistence in STEM graduate education. This project will be evaluated with formative and summative approaches that use information acquired through interviews and surveys with faculty mentors and students. Results of this project will be made available by publicizing the findings in both technical and popular communications from the participating academic units and from the education- and community-outreach offices of USF that target audiences such as other institutions of higher education, and the region's public, professional, and scholarly organizations. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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