Frederick Community College STEM Scholars

Frederick Community College, Frederick MD

Investigators

Abstract

The NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program supports the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Frederick Community College. Throughout its 5 years, this project will fund 30 scholarships in 3 groups of 10 students who are pursuing associate's degrees in STEM disciplines. The program will offer these scholars the resources and support needed to identify appropriate STEM-related academic and career pathways and make a full-time commitment to achieving their goals related to their chosen pathways. The project will answer the need to train more students to become STEM professionals. With financial support, faculty mentoring, exposure to research, industry experiences, and opportunities for STEM-related community service, students will develop an identity not only as STEM students, but as professionals entering a discipline and members of a robust STEM community. This project will seek to provide new understandings of how to improve student enrollment and success (retention, completion, and/or transfer) using STEM scholarship funds and student interventions. The research in the project will build upon and extend prior studies around increasing STEM enrollment using scholarships and interdisciplinary seminars, retention models for STEM majors, and best practices for student intervention identified by Complete College America. Along with these activities, a speaker series, field trips, service learning opportunities, and other co-curricular events will be created by the STEM Scholars program to aid in the creation of a cohort identity. Through interviews and surveys, the program plans to determine which parts of the program attracted students, how and why these components affected them academically and socially, and how these experiences made lasting changes to their future success. It will also examine the impact of the scholarships covering the entire cost of attendance on students' employment. 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.