2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In higher education, faculty diversity is critical for a variety of important outcomes, including supporting students in pursuing and persisting in STEM fields by providing in-group role models. However, current engineering faculty do not equitably represent the general population. In order to address this lack of representation in higher education engineering programs, the University of Lowell S-STEM program has the goal to recruit three cohorts of low-income, high-achieving students who wish to pursue a career in higher education. The UML S-STEM program supports engineering scholars for four years, their last two years of undergraduate school and their first two years of graduate school. The goal of the program is to attract and retain diverse engineering S-STEM scholars and prepare them to enter the competitive pool of future faculty candidates.

We present our successes and challenges in recruiting the first two cohorts of low-income, high-achieving students. In the first year, we focused on email blasts, a social media campaign, partnering with student groups, and general outreach via career panels. 55 eligible students were identified by the financial aid office, 12 applications received, and 4 students fit the timeline and eligibility requirements (all were accepted). Three of the four are first generation students, and three of the four identify as students from underrepresented minority backgrounds in engineering. Recruitment lessons learned were that because the scholarship opportunity is so unique, emails alone from a faculty member the students are not familiar with do not work well. Additionally, sophomores are often not proactively seeking more information and scholarship opportunities for graduate school. As a result of these findings, we increased our outreach opportunities to allow students to discuss and explore the benefits of graduate school to build the interest and self-efficacy of our target population. Further, we asked faculty members that work with the students to reach out to students individually and encourage them to apply. Using this approach, after identifying 79 eligible students, 38 applications were received, 84% from our list of eligible students, and 63% from populations underrepresented in engineering.