2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Since the fall of 2008, XXXXX University has hosted an NSF-funded S-STEM grant and has awarded scholarships that have helped fund XX students to graduation. The S-STEM program we have enacted has been structured based upon a seminar in which all scholarship recipients are required to participate. The seminar was and is a key feature of the grant and was, at the time of the initial grant application, unique. Seminar activities include community-service-based design, and aspects of professional and personal development. Personal and professional development activities have been selected to introduce skills that might help students succeed in finding and maintaining employment in their chosen STEM field and help them to advance in their employment thereafter. These activities are not typically offered to students outside the scholarship program. In this paper, we will report on past graduates’ perceptions of those “personal and professional development” activities, gathered via survey of alumni. We seek to understand which activities the past students feel have been advantageous to them, and which might be less so. The goal of the paper is to provide thinking points for other scholarship administrators who might wish to consider inclusion of similar activities.