AMHERST — Two University of Massachusetts Amherst professors have won $987,000 from the National Science Foundation to continue their work attracting underrepresented groups into the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, commonly referred to as STEM.
Education professor Elizabeth McEneaney and biologist Peg Riley received the three-year grant as part of their efforts to draw in and retain students of color, first-generation college students and federal Pell Grant-eligible students in STEM, a field where those groups are very underrepresented nationwide.
The initiative, known as the STEM Ambassadors Program, started in 2014 with an $825,000 grant from the UMass president’s office. The program already partners incoming freshmen with graduate-student mentors, but also sets those freshmen up to themselves be mentors for middle-school students in the Holyoke school system. The idea, Riley told the Gazette, is to develop a supportive web of scholars to combat the hurdles underrepresented students face in entering STEM fields.
“What we’ve done is created this network of interactions that appears to be very powerful in getting students engaged, keeping them engaged and developing what we call their ‘science identity,’” she said.
The STEM Ambassadors Program typically accepts as many as 40 students who apply each fall, and in their first year they learn skills like how to read peer-reviewed articles and literature reviews. In the second year, they are paired with faculty and graduate students to get lab experience, which Riley said is a good predictor of success in STEM, which has a high rate of student attrition that is larger for underrepresented groups.
Riley said the program is currently serving well over 100 students, and that they expect to extend that reach to as many as 250. The program also features up to six slots for summer lab research experience.
The new grant will include partnerships with Holyoke Community College and the UMass Boston commuter campus, in order to provide both mentoring as well as early research possibilities for students there, which the STEM Ambassadors Program’s director, Carolyn Gardner-Thomas, said is essential to closing performance gaps between underrepresented students and others.
“Every person of color that is able to stay in STEM, they all have different stories,” Gardner-Thomas said, herself an African-American woman who studied chemical engineering at UMass and this year got her doctorate in education. “It’s quite a journey.”
But all those stories, Gardner-Thomas said, have a common thread — the extra hurdles placed in front of underrepresented students.
“You start getting these subliminal messages that this is not for me,” she said, whether it’s systemic racism, a lack of outreach, the fact that so many STEM professionals aren’t people of color or other impediments. “They don’t reach us, so we’re not retained in STEM for whatever reasons.”
A new study published recently in the journal Educational Researcher found that disadvantaged minority and female underrepresentation in academic faculty “is driven predominantly by underrepresentation in science and math intensive fields.” The report, written by researchers at the University of Missouri, compared senior and junior faculty to find that there was a trend toward increasing diversity, including in STEM fields. Black faculty, however, were the exception to that trend.
The hope is that the UMass program will continue to help keep talented students from being left behind, and will work toward solving a problem that has profound impacts.
“If my community is not part of the conversation in science, we are vulnerable to exploitation,” Gardner-Thomas said in a statement on the consequences of a lack of diversity in STEM. “If we are not involved in STEM careers, we’re getting left further behind, and the already persistent income opportunities gap continues to widen.”
“It gives our students a boost from day one,” Riley said of the program. When those students get paired with a mentor, but are also put in a role to begin mentoring themselves, Riley said, they suddenly think, “Oh, I am a scientist.”
Doctoral student and education researcher Ally Hunter will study how exactly how the initiative affects students’ academic success in STEM fields, and will identify what kinds of variables affect those outcomes.
“This model can help us discover what works,” Hunter said in a statement. “We already have some ideas; we know students seek to belong to a community that reflects their own identities, and we believe an early research experience is important, as well.”
But with the National Science Foundation money lasting only three years, Gardner-Thomas said, she wishes universities would provide full funding for projects addressing a problem that has long been recognized, and on which there is still much work to be done.
“Just the fact that we have to reach out to grants to get this work done is a problem for me,” Gardner-Thomas said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.