Transfer Students Pathway to Graduate School

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With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, the Transfer Student Pathways to Graduate School program will provide support to low-income students with demonstrated financial need and academic promise to succeed in the College of Engineering (CoE) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). The project will fund 64 scholarships over 5 years for transfer students who will pursue bachelor's degrees in engineering disciplines. The significance of this project is in its potential contributions to the scholarly literature on persistence in graduate school by low-income community college students. This literature is extremely limited and the Transfer Student Pathways to Graduate School project will help close that knowledge gap.This S-STEM Track 2 project will investigate the predictors of a graduate school path for community-college transfers and the effective interventions to promote this in engineering. The program will focus on increasing scholars' academic achievement and self-efficacy and preparing them for entry to graduate school through individualized supportive services. Those services include faculty mentoring, counseling, individualized plans for graduate school, peer advising from graduate students and access to the UCB CoE's expansive student services network. The program objectives are to 1) increase enrollment of transfer students into STEM graduate programs; 2) provide low-income transfer students with supportive programs that better prepare them for entry to and success in graduate school; and 3) advance understanding in higher education communities of methods that prepare low-income transfer students to enter graduate school and the workforce.