AGEP-T-Collaborative Research: California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate

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The California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 12-554) for the AGEP-Transformation (AGEP-T) track. The AGEP-T track targets strategic alliances of institutions and organizations to develop, implement, and study innovative evidence-based models and standards for STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and academic STEM career preparation that eliminate or mitigate negative factors and promote positive practices for URMs.The California AGEP is a collaboration between four doctoral degree granting institutions in California, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University, and California Institute of Technology. The vision of the California AGEP is to establish an alliance to ensure that underrepresented minority (URM) PhDs from alliance institutions, in much larger numbers, aspire to and populate the ranks of the postdoctoral population, the faculty at competitive research and teaching institutions, the federally funded national laboratories, and scientific think tanks. The California Alliance focuses on increasing diversity in the academic fields with the greatest URMs: the mathematical, physical, and computer sciences; and engineering (MPCS&E).The goal of the California AGEP is to significantly increase the movement of URM students into the most competitive research and teaching careers in the MPCS&E fields to systematically address ethnic underrepresentation in the particular STEM fields and at the institutions where it is most severe and remains seemingly intractable nationally. The California Alliance defines URMs as African Americans, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Alaskans, Native Pacific Islanders, and American Indians. CA-AGEP participants are US citizens who are enrolled as doctoral students, who are URMs, and who are in the MPCS&E fields at the alliance institutions during the award period, including those who graduate during the award period, and URM postdoctoral fellows who are US citizens in the MPCS&E fields at the alliance institutions during the award period.The objectives of the California AGEP include:Objective 1. Create an unprecedented community of practice across the four institutions that include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and key administrators.Objective 2. Engage faculty as mentors to advance URM students' careers across these four institutions.Objective 3. Develop, implement, evaluate and set new standards for professional development.Objective 4. Promote URM PhD advancement to faculty and postdoctoral ranks in STEM through new partnerships and using new tools, and in partnership with federally funded national laboratories.Objective 5. Conduct research that leverages the architecture of the California Alliance to identify which of the specific programs and initiatives that are in effect in research universities working to increase diversity are most impactful in ensuring URM students' success and professional ascension in the MPCS&E fields, and more generally within STEM.The activities that contribute to the model for this alliance are many and quite varied; they include: Objective 1: Hold an annual retreat, with both discipline-specific and cohort-specific sessions. Introduce students, postdocs and faculty to each other using in-person sessions, web site and new media. Create recruitment opportunity for faculty, departments, and national labs.Objective 2: The Internal Steering Committee (ISC) and the Implementation Team (IT) make faculty aware of California AGEP (CA-AGEP). Invite and stimulate alliance-wide faculty advisement and mentoring of CA-AGEP students & postdocs. Include substantial presence of faculty at the annual retreat. Engage faculty in development of professional development sessions. Engage faculty in recording and streaming of professional development activities on the campuses.Objective 3: Develop and institute a complete collection of professional development sessions & provide cross-alliance access to all CA-AGEP students. Objective 4: Develop and market new joint California Alliance postdocs. Offer postdoc opportunities to California Alliance students. Encourage departments to create further postdoc opportunities where strong applicant pool warrants this. Link all 4 CA-AGEP universities to the University of California President?s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) for professional development and networking in an extended national postdoc community. Create database of CA-AGEP scholars and access at annual retreat to graduating PhDs for direct recruitment by CA-AGEP and other university department representatives and national labs.Objective 5: Conduct annual surveys of students with measures related to well-being, identification with the university, attitudes, experiences, perceptions, and performance. Conduct semi-structured interviews with students, postdocs and faculty. Collect and analyze mentor reports. Use of dismantling strategy in researchThe CA-AGEP includes a social science research study that employs a dismantling treatment strategy to link exposure and utilization of the various initiatives and services offered to students through the CA-AGEP with individual and group outcomes. Individual student level attitudinal assessments draw primarily from the social-psychological and educational literature on factors that relate to achievement, both population-general (e.g., self-esteem) as well as measures of variables that specifically tap into URM students' experiences (e.g., experiences relating to racism). Institutional assessments focus on the qualities of the institutional programs and structures, and these measures tap into sociological-level variables.