Increasing Graduation Rates of Undergraduate Chemistry and Physics Majors by Connecting College to Careers

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This project will help meet the national need for skilled scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians. It will do so by supporting the persistence and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with financial need at Georgia College and State University. Over its five-year duration, the project will provide scholarships to eighteen full-time students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in chemistry and/or physics. The Scholars will enter in two annual cohorts and receive up to four years of scholarship support. The project seeks to increase student persistence by linking scholarships with effective supporting activities, including tutoring, team advising, mentoring, undergraduate research experiences, service learning, graduate school preparation, internships, and community building. The project will also support curriculum improvements designed to increase second-year student retention. Through project evaluation and research, new knowledge will be generated about factors that influence educational access, persistence, and academic and post-graduation success of STEM undergraduates, including those from populations traditionally underrepresented in STEM. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Academic and social support activities, such as summer bridge, undergraduate research, first-year seminar, and mentoring, can increase student persistence and success in STEM. However, limited data exist about the impact of such activities on low-income STEM majors who gain increased access to them by receiving additional financial support. Specifically, little is known how these support activities affect STEM undergraduates' engagement, self-efficacy, persistence, and post-graduation placement. To help fill this gap, the project will investigate the effects of early community-building activities in a low-stakes social environment on Scholars’ persistence, engagement, and sense of belonging. It will also study the impact of a second-year research methods and scientific communication seminar on Scholars’ self-efficacy and interest in undergraduate research. To better understand the career pathways and goals of academically talented, low-income students in STEM, the project aims to determine the impact that participation in summer internships and undergraduate research has on post-graduation job and graduate school placement. The project evaluator will use a mixed-methods approach to examine project implementation (outputs), the project's impact on participants (outcomes), and strategic impacts and sustainability of the project. The results of the project will be disseminated by publications in peer-reviewed journals, presentations in scientific conferences, and posting on the project website. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers and 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.