Bridge to the Doctorate: 2014-2016 UT Arlington Cohort

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The University of Texas System Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) will host a Bridge to the Doctorate Program (BD) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). The 2014-2016 UTA BD program is designed to recruit and support a cohort of twelve highly qualified alumni of LSAMP institutions who are committed to developing the necessary skills and knowledge needed to earn doctoral degrees and achieve successful careers in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM). The program will collaborate and leverage the resources of the Institute for Broadening Participation (IBP) and the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). UTA's BD Program, building on past successes, will undertake a series of intervention strategies that are focused on enhancing teaching skills, offering structured mentoring and near peer mentoring, encouraging persistence, and providing networking/community building as well as professional development opportunities. The proposed program will lead to the enhancement of and discovery of additional effective strategies for graduate student success of underrepresented groups, which may be applicable to other universities and colleges. Moreover, it will contribute to the national goal of increasing the numbers of talented students historically underrepresented in STEM disciplines with Ph.D. degrees and the numbers of STEM faculty from underrepresented groups who can effectively teach and mentor future STEM students. UTA's LSAMP BD leadership team has a demonstrated track-record of recruiting, mentoring, retaining, and graduating students historically underrepresented in STEM disciplines. The leadership team will work closely with the UT Arlington Office of Graduate Studies, academic advisors, and faculty mentors to provide a multi-layered network of support to the BD Fellows. UT Arlington's Office of Graduate Studies offer a variety of student support activities and programming that include topics such as responsible conduct of research, goal setting in graduate study, mentoring, professional communications, obtaining internal and external funding, and dissertation preparation. It is expected that all BD Fellows will participate in professional development, academic preparation, and research activities beginning their first year of enrollment. BD Fellows will: (i) attend a series of 1-credit hour face-to-face and online graduate courses designed to assist in the successful completion of their doctoral studies, (ii) engage in high-quality, faculty-mentored research while fulfilling Ph.D. dissertation requirements, and (iii) receive training in the ON-TRAC (Organizational Network for Teaching-as-Research Advancement and Collaboration) program, a new STEM teaching excellence program offered by CIRTL. IBP, a non-profit organization with more than ten years of experience in developing and managing virtual communities, will assist the leadership team in developing a BD virtual community. This virtual platform will allow for interdisciplinary informal interactions between faculty, BD Fellows, and STEM professionals from across the United States.