Improving Career Readiness of STEM Students Through Worksite Visits, Job Shadowing, and Internships during Their Early College Years

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With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 1 project seeks to prepare students for careers in STEM. To do so, the project will provide community college students with opportunities to explore STEM careers through a sequence of workplace visits, job shadowing, and internships. By enabling students to interact with STEM professionals, the project team predicts that students will gain an understanding of what it takes to be a STEM professional and the breadth of what STEM professionals do. These interactions are expected to help build students’ confidence and motivation to pursue careers in STEM. As a result of the project’s emphasis on engaging Hispanic students and students from other groups that are underrepresented in STEM, the project has the potential to contribute to the diversity of the STEM workforce. The project includes a robust plan to build partnerships with local research facilities and high-tech industry partners. This model of industry partnerships that build networks between students and STEM professionals may prove to be a model that other institutions could use to provide students with STEM career exploration opportunities.This project will engage first- and second-year students with STEM professionals in a progressive sequence of experiences beginning with work site visits, continuing to job shadowing and internships. These workplace experiences will occur early in the academic journey of community college students. The intention is that, over two years, students will participate in a sequence of workplace exposures that require increasingly greater effort and provide increasingly higher potential impact. A mixed-methods evaluation will test the hypothesis that these career-focused experiences will increase students' self-confidence, motivate them to participate in academic support activities, and contribute to their success in becoming STEM professionals. This work is important because, by expanding and enriching the learning environment to include workplaces, the project will examine how community college STEM programs can increase participation in STEM among all demographic groups of students. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.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.