Sophomore Fellows: Cultivating New Scientists through Research, Mentoring, and Community

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With funding from the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, the Sophomore Fellows project will support high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout its five years of funding, this project will fund 125 annual scholarships of up to $5,000 for sophomore students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in Astronomy, Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, and Physics. The Sophomore Fellows project will engage these Scholars in research projects that are situated in a community of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty mentors. The goal of the Sophomore Fellows project is to increase persistence and graduation rates of low-income students, including those from groups that are underrepresented in STEM, while better preparing students for graduate school and scientific careers. This project will investigate the efficacy of coupling financial aid with intra-curricular research, faculty mentorship, and peer mentoring activities to improve student academic growth and persistence. Sophomore Fellows leverages the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. FRI is a community-based curriculum-integrated program that engages undergraduate students in research. The Sophomore Fellows project will use the existing FRI program structure, which has been demonstrated to increase graduation rates in STEM, and will add a financial incentive to encourage students to persist at the most common attrition point between their first and second years. Sophomore Fellows will take courses in an FRI research stream. A research group that includes faculty, graduate students, and other undergraduates, will form the structure for this research experience. It is expected that this experience will help students develop skills including teamwork, research, writing, and oral communication. In their second semester, Sophomore Fellows will serve as peer mentors for incoming FRI students, amplifying the impact of these scholarships to dozens of students for every award given.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.