Supporting low-income student success in STEM through community, mentoring, and immersive research in biology and biochemistry

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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 STEM students with demonstrated financial need. This project aims to increase student success in biology and biochemistry. This will be accomplished by providing students with multiple supports, including first-year communities, sustained advising and mentoring, on-going professional and career development events, and real-world research training. This project will provide undergraduate students with professional experiences, academic training, and skills needed for STEM employment and graduate school in the region and beyond. Further, the project will generate insights about how combining multiple support systems can promote undergraduate student persistence and success in biology and biochemistry. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion for low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project will occur at Minnesota State University, Mankato, a regional comprehensive university that serves many rural and first-generation college students. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 24 unique students, in three cohorts, who are pursuing undergraduate degrees in biology and biochemistry. Specific goals include removing barriers to STEM retention and success by providing scholarship monies, supportive learning communities, on-going peer and faculty mentoring, and an authentic first-year research experience. This combination of multiple interventions is designed to retain low-income students in STEM majors and support their post-graduate careers in STEM. While some of these approaches have been evaluated in the literature separately, this project aims to determine how these interventions might interact synergistically to improve STEM student success and outcomes. Through focus groups, surveys, institutional data, and direct observations, the project will investigate how first-year research experiences, coupled with social integration (first-year seminar, learning community) and sustained support (mentoring, tutoring, scholarship, pop-up events), may influence student success in biology and biochemistry. Project results will be disseminated through conference presentations, journal articles, and local and regional symposia. 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.