The National GEM Consortium: Graduate Student Travel Grant Program

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This project will expose current senior-level graduate students, who are identified as University and Associate GEM Fellows to university and industry leadership, during the 41st GEM National Conference in New York City, New York. The overarching goal of the program is to positively impact the nation's economic welfare by increasing the ranks of underrepresented minorities, who are technical leaders and who are considering long-term careers throughout the engineering enterprise. Connecting this diverse pool of engineering talent with industry and university leadership (during the annual GEM conference) will offer a forum to enhance their professional success as they extend their network and engage in professional development, which will better prepare graduate degree earners for a career in industry or academia. A mixed-methods approach will be used to examine the impact conference participation had on the sample of underrepresented graduate students' career interests and goals. It is likely that this project will yield important empirical findings on how universities and industry leaders can work together to develop and prepare a cadre of underrepresented, engineering graduate degree earners for long-term STEM careers. The findings will also help to identify students' motivations and perceived benefits for participating in specific professional development opportunities. Such information will be beneficial to both university and industry stakeholders to collectively develop a sustained pool of diverse engineering candidates for positions in universities and government/industrial laboratories.