Challenging Problems and Sustainable Solutions - Training a community of Interdisciplinary Sustainability Scholars

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This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison). Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to at least 26 full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees fields such as engineering, biology, chemistry, environmental science, and mathematics. It will also support at least 6 junior STEM transfer students. The supported students will enroll in one of the multiple sustainability-focused certificates available, meet regularly as a cohort, and will have opportunities to be part of additional professional development experiences. A distinguishing feature of this project is an opportunity for paid summer internships at the Office of Sustainability between the freshman and sophomore year to gain professional experience in sustainability early in the students’ academic careers. In their junior and senior years, students will be part of a Community Environmental Scholars Program seminar, which will help them explore how their STEM discipline and their sustainability focus can connect to community service. The broader impacts of the project will improve access to STEM education for low-income students and ensure their successful degree completion. The project also explicitly connects STEM students with the broad issues of sustainability and community engagement, which can help to create well-rounded graduates while also promoting retention of students in STEM. The intellectual merit of the project involves the development of methods to educate STEM professionals to meet the strategic sustainability needs of the United States. The project meets this challenge by offering cohort-based sustainability training to STEM students from a wide range of disciplines, and explicitly training those students to work in teams as parts of a broader community of sustainability professionals.The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project goals and specific aims include increasing the number of low-income STEM students who are sustainability experts. Sustainability has been suggested as an attractive theme with which to recruit and retain students. The project will be evaluated using surveys and interviews to see if it results in better retention and persistence in challenging STEM disciplines. The project results will be shared internally, through teaching and learning networks at UW–Madison, and externally through disciplinary conferences. 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.