Enhancing the Transfer Experience through a Collaborative Cohort Program for Engineering Scholars

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This five-year project aims to contribute to the national need for well-educated engineers. It will support the success of at least thirty low-income, high-achieving STEM undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need at Fresno City College, a two-year institution. Specifically, the project will provide two-year scholarships to five cohorts of students who are pursuing an associate's degree or certificate in engineering at Fresno City College. At least thirty students will be supported at Fresno City College, two of whom will receive an additional two-year scholarship to complete a bachelor's degree in engineering at California State-Fresno. At Fresno City College, the Scholars will participate in program orientation at the beginning of each fall semester, pursue a transfer pathway curriculum designed to transition students to a four-year university engineering program, attend bi-weekly seminar events and monthly meetings with faculty mentors and peer mentors, serve as peer mentors for succeeding cohorts of Scholars, and participate in undergraduate research projects in collaboration with California State-Fresno. Fresno City College is a Hispanic-serving institution and recruiting will focus on women and students with disabilities, thus increasing the potential of the project to broaden participation in engineering. The goal of the project is to increase degree completion of low-income, high-achieving engineering undergraduates. The project includes a research plan to determine factors that influence student identity and sense of belonging. The researchers will test the hypothesis that engaging Fresno City College students in a collaborative, cohort experience will support students' movement from the periphery of learning to the center of a community in which learning is a collective experience guided by community membership. This project has the potential to create new knowledge about how the socio-cultural context of students from an area of concentrated poverty, such as Fresno, experience community and develop a STEM identity. This project is funded by the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income, academically high-achieving students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future scientists, engineers, and technicians, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.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.