Expanding Career Pathways for Academically Talented Biology and Chemistry Undergraduates by Combining Financial Support with High-Impact Co-curricular Services

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP), an historically Native-American Indian institution, with a 59.7% overall minority undergraduate enrollment. Over the 5-year project term, the program will serve a total of 30 students: 3 cohorts of 10 students, who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in Biology or Chemistry, recruited as rising freshmen and supported to graduation. This project will focus on increasing scholars' self-efficacy, STEM identity, motivation, career awareness and preparing them for entry into graduate school or the STEM workforce through high-impact co-curricular support services. Such services include exposure to career paths, career counseling, research experiences, faculty mentoring, and tutoring by faculty, graduate students, and professional tutors. This project will also exercise important broader impact by supporting the economic development of UNCP's rural, predominantly minority service region.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Three principle objectives inform the project's execution. First, to identify, retain, and graduate students with demonstrated financial need in the Biology and Chemistry fields through financial support and academic interventions. Second, to help students set personal goals and identify careers in STEM, then provide the support and experiences needed to work towards attainment of those goals. Third, to support students as they transition to the STEM workforce or graduate education and capitalize on an established alumni workforce to build sustained interest in STEM careers for future UNCP science students. The majority of UNCP students hail from the local Southeast North Carolina region, a rural, economically depressed region, and the majority have unmet financial need. UNCP is one of the three institutions in the UNC system participating in the North Carolina (NC) promise tuition plan which provides $500 tuition for in-state students and $2,500 for out-of-state students. This situation provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the importance and impact of the project's proposed strategies and interventions by comparing its results with a control group consisting of low-income students who are taking advantage of the NC promise tuition plan, but are not participating in the proposed activities. As such, the project's research questions will be geared toward understanding which factors most positively contribute to persistence and post-graduation placements. This investigation should help in identifying the predictors of successful STEM-workforce career paths for rural, low income, mostly minority students and effective interventions to promote such career transitions. The PI and team anticipate that their project's results can inform sister NC promise institutions, as well as other institutions of similar characteristics, with results being disseminated through publications and presentations at regional and national conferences. Using a combination of surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews, an external consultant will evaluate the project's outcomes in the areas of student academic performance, activities and interventions, awareness and understanding of STEM pathways and careers, STEM identity, and post-graduation career activities/placement. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

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.