PS 1-11 - Graduate Student Scholarships to Advance Community Engaged Solutions to the Grand Challenge of Managing Nitrogen

Background/Question/Methods

Challenges at the intersection of society and the environment reveal the need for graduate education in geosciences, engineering, and biology. The need for immediate income, however, draws many high-achieving but low-income college graduates into the workforce rather than graduate STEM training. This brain drain from ecology may exacerbate underrepresentation of certain ethnicities in the field. Strategies are needed to increase graduate training opportunities for low-income students in ecology.

We suggest that successful strategies will emphasize campus integration, training in core and interdisciplinary areas, mentoring, professional development, and financial support. However, diverse students with financial need present varying forms of capital that compose their community cultural wealth (CCW). This variation in CCW may influence the efficacy of the many elements in our strategy. Accordingly, we established an interdisciplinary S-STEM project for master’s degree students studying ecology. Project goals are: (1.) To increase student success by providing scholarships, tuition assistance, research experience, mentoring, professional development activities, cohort formation, and community engagement opportunities; and (2.) To conduct graduate education research that investigates how CCW fostered within our S-STEM project supports graduate student success, and identifies which knowledge, skills, and competencies acquired through project activities facilitate graduation and workforce entry.

Results/Conclusions

Scholarships were made available to graduate students seeking master’s degrees in six degree programs, with similar representations from geoscience, engineering, and biology disciplines. Thus far, ~$250K (plus tuition waivers) has been disbursed to 34 students with financial need. A high proportion of these students have been women and underrepresented minorities. Fifteen students have graduated into the STEM workforce, with others still enrolled. Over two years, we have hosted 54 group activities to foster interdisciplinary cohort development among students. Approximately half of these included meeting and interacting with working environmental professionals or guest academics, thereby exposing students to numerous forms of professional life. Many students participated in community engagement activities such as live webinars with high-school environmental science students (now on YouTube), or tackling community-identified problems through their master’s thesis research.

Among the types of activities we hosted, our education research identified that “scholars roundtables”, our intermittent all-student gatherings for thematic conversations, influenced students’ aspirational and social capital via engaging faculty and peers. Education research also revealed that activities to foster practical skills (academic writing, job application) were helpful. In sum, we have found that student success benefits greatly from forming interdisciplinary peer and faculty cohorts that constitute supportive networks.