Curricular, Co-curricular, Social, and Financial Supports for Successful Transfer and Graduation of Engineering Undergraduates from Rural/Nontraditional Backgrounds

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This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Polk State College and the University of South Florida. The participating students will pursue an Associate degree at Polk State College and transfer to the University of South Florida to complete a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Over its five-year duration, the project will provide four-year scholarships to 50 full- or part-time students, in two cohorts of 25 students. To facilitate transfer students’ transition to the University and support their academic success, the project will provide (a) a Pre-Engineering Academy, (b) Grand Challenges-focused project-based learning, (c) peer-led course-driven learning communities to create a social learning environment, (d) proactive advising and mentoring, and (e) career competency training. The novel feature of this project is its role as a conduit to ensure academic success and social integration for rural, non-traditional transfer students into a metropolitan research-intensive university. The project expects that such supports will enable the students to earn an associate's degree and a bachelor’s degree in engineering, thus opening up greater opportunities for employment and career success. The project will leverage and enhance relationships between high schools in rural parts of Polk County, and will recruit non-traditional students through the Gateway to College Collegiate High School. Lessons learned and guidelines for building successful STEM transfer support systems will be disseminated to other institutions intending to build effective academic and social pathways between two-year and four-year institutions. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Specifically, the project aims to create a bridge from associate to baccalaureate degree completion through curricular, co-curricular, social, and financial interventions specifically tailored to the students’ needs. Rural community college students transferring to a four-year institution face additional socio-cultural challenges compared to suburban or urban transfer students, with social acclimatization explicitly needed for rural students transferring to an urban university. This project will investigate the impact of the proposed curricular and co-curricular activities on community college students’ retention, transfer, and degree attainment, and the effect of those activities on students’ engineering identity development. The project will also examine the effects of curricular and co-curricular activities on community college transfer students’ social acclimatization in moving from a rural to a metropolitan environment. 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 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.