2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The objective of the Awards to Increase Mechanical (ME) and Electrical/Computer Engineering (ECE) Diversity (AIME) S-STEM program is to increase sustainable gender and ethnic diversity by (a) financially supporting talented Underrepresented Minority (URM) students at Drexel University (DU), (b) activating networks that will support the AIME scholar’s intellectual growth, sense of belonging, socialization to their discipline, cultural capital, and (c) transforming the departmental culture that has structurally marginalized URM students in the past. Over six years, the program will award 23 four-year scholarships across two cohorts, with the first cohort of 9 students beginning in 2023-2024. This project is designed to drive institutional changes in how ME and ECE programs recruit and retain URM students, by not only providing financial support, but also examining how comprehensive services can enhance disciplinary learning and foster positive identity development. Specifically, AIME has cultivated strategic recruitment partnerships with local stakeholders in STEM education to recruit talented, under-resourced students from URM and women populations in the Philadelphia School District (PSD) and offer resources both financial through scholarships and academic through mentorship, tutoring, and undergraduate research opportunities, to scaffold their success at DU and eventually entering a rewarding lucrative engineering field. Additionally, AIME will explore the use of podcasting to explore themes our AIME Scholars find relevant including interviews of recent graduates and URM engineers in the workforce as a potential resource for supporting the authoring of positive disciplinary identities for the identified student population.

Although one of the purposes of the AIME program is to provide financial support to talented URM and women students with unmet financial need in ME and ECE disciplines, we recognize that there are other obstacles URMs and women face in an academic environment. To increase the likelihood of equitable educational experiences for our AIME Scholars and to interrupt the current policies and departmental culture that compromise learning opportunities and participation in academic programs, we adopted the Thrive Mosaic (TM) Scholar Development Framework. This framework is a conceptual toolkit for equitable STEM identity and leadership development that centers the student’s development of social capital, community and cultural wealth, and academic capital within an ecosystem of partners (associates, advocates, mentors, coaches, connectors, targeting trainers) who will provide specific support throughout the undergraduate experience. We are adopting this evidence-based framework because it disrupts the well-established obstructions to equity and inclusion in most institutions. It builds cultural competence among the TM partners responsible for providing services and guidance to URMs and women while supporting the educational goals of our AIME scholars by nurturing a sense of belonging, supporting intellectual growth, socializing them to their academic discipline, assigning value to their cultural differences and creating a welcoming environment. This project and its findings will inform engineering programs as they explore ways to support URM students' intellectual growth, while also fostering a sense of belonging in ME, ECE, and the broader engineering community.