FAST-TRAC: Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Advanced Degree Attainment for Low Income Engineering Students

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The FAST-TRAC program at Tufts University School of Engineering will recruit, prepare, and support academically talented low-income undergraduate students to complete an MS in Engineering through Tufts' existing 5-year BS/MS program. FAST-TRAC's core features will be early outreach, support of the student-research mentor relationship, skill-building workshops, and undergraduate research experiences. Industry partnerships will connect students to current state of the art challenges in their fields. FAST-TRAC will establish a comprehensive and transferrable support framework to prepare low-income undergraduate STEM students for the increased rigor, culture, and expectations of a graduate program.The FAST-TRAC research component will make significant contributions to the knowledge base about what inhibits and facilitates the matriculation of underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students into STEM graduate programs. This program will characterize the needs, perceptions, and research competencies of low-income students pursuing graduate Engineering degrees, and will measure the effectiveness of each program component in helping students achieve the MS degree. The project will measure the contextual supports and barriers to pursuing graduate education or securing a position in industry using the social-cognitive theory of career choice and development. This measure has been extensively used in the study of career choice and successfully applied to examine the roots of gender and ethnic disparities in STEM disciplines.