Finding common ground: support and preparation of students for interdisciplinary STEM careers

About This Grant

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 Purchase College, a Hispanic Serving Institution. Over its six-year duration, this Track 2 project will fund scholarships to 34 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, and mathematics/computer science. Nine first-year students will receive up to four years of scholarship support and 25 transfer students will receive up to two years of scholarship support. This project intends to help students persist to graduation with degrees in STEM fields by combining scholarships with effective supporting activities including faculty and peer mentoring and a two-week pre-semester math skills workshop for incoming scholars in need of additional math training. A non-credit S-STEM Community Seminar will serve as the hub for academic and social support and build commonalities among participants. Because Purchase College and its partner community colleges serve a broad pool of STEM students, the project has the potential to expand the circle of STEM professionals and to generate knowledge on effective methods for increasing the retention of those students. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of high-achieving, low-income undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project aims to: provide scholarship support closely aligned with unmet need; increase the retention, graduation, and persistence rates of S-STEM Scholars; and generate new knowledge on the impact of planned, curricular and co-curricular interventions on reducing attrition in introductory STEM courses and on the effectiveness of cohort building activities on scholar persistence to STEM careers. STEM curricula have demonstrated interdependencies, such as algebra skills necessary for biology. Thus, the relatively high attrition rates in essential foundational courses such as calculus represent real obstacles to producing the next generation of STEM practitioners. This project intends to investigate the impact of providing students with a math skills workshop, combined with proactive tutoring, to build the confidence and stamina to carry out the long, complicated algebraic operations needed in STEM courses. A planned STEM Community Seminar takes on the broader task of building a mutual and supportive community for students as they navigate their course curricula and prepare for modern STEM careers. Embedded evaluation will facilitate an iterative process for continuous learning and improvement will ensure that the project leadership team will use the feedback to achieve project goals and objectives. Project outcomes will be disseminated through the Purchase College website and social media accounts, Open SUNY, and SUNY Learning Commons, and to affiliated STEM educational organizations such as the Empire State STEM Learning Network and national STEMx. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of academically talented, low-income 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.