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1. Need-Based Scholarship Program: Who is Applying, Who is Successful, and Who is Not Applying?

   Rynearson, Anastasia; Miller, Michele; Gartner, Jacqueline (June 2019, American Society of Engineering Education)

   A recent S-STEM award has allowed the engineering program in a rural, liberal arts institution to offer a need-based scholarship program for its students. The engineering program has a number of veteran, underrepresented minority, transfer, and nontraditional students. Many students are also first-generation college students. The institution and engineering program matriculate a number of under-served populations, students who may have needs that are not well understood in the typical engineering education literature. The scholarship program and its associated mentoring and activities will assist workforce development and will also incorporate a number of research avenues to better understand and serve the student population in this unique setting. To apply for the program, students must fill out an application with four 250 – 500 word essay responses relating to their academic progress, perceived barriers to degree completion, and how this award would help them to complete their degree. This initial study seeks to analyze the student applications to explore which students are applying for the new scholarship program and which students are successful in their applications. Responses to the application questions will be analyzed to develop an archetypical applicant, an archetypical successful applicant, and an archetypical unsuccessful applicant. Similar to the IDEO method of creating a specific client to design for, these profiles will not encompass all possible student responses; not all students who would be grouped with the archetype would see themselves in the archetype. Rather, these archetypes will help us to define students that we can use as a model when we are developing programs for the students in the scholarship program and the student body as a whole. These profiles will be presented and used to generate an understanding of which students are likely to choose to apply and which students may be missing out on this opportunity. At this time, the applications are not yet due and the analysis has not yet begun. Initial interest for the grant has been strong and we anticipate at least thirty applications for the nineteen available grants. Results presented will include the three student profiles as well as a report of the perceived barriers to graduation as reported by applicants in their application materials. 

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2. Lessons Learned in an S-STEM Program: How to Improve Recruitment and Cohort Building

   Gartner, Jacqueline; Miller, Michele; Rynearson, Anastasia (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   A small liberal arts university in the south received an S-STEM grant in 2018 focused on the School of Engineering. Important factors in the program's success are applicant recruitment and cohort building. Our recruiting efforts targeted at-risk students who entered the University with less math preparation. In the first year, we met our goals for recruitment in terms of overall applicant numbers but not in terms of the number of at-risk students. In the second year, we had fewer overall applicants, but the proportion that were at-risk was higher. In the area of cohort building, feedback from the scholarship recipients indicated our programming did not build community or provide opportunities for them to meet students in the other years. In that first year, the project team organized and led professional development and social events. The social events had little structure, and attendance was poor. In the second year, we hired a consultant to provide sessions for students on topics such as value identification, gratitude, and mindfulness. The sessions had positive student feedback. In addition to providing professional development skills, the interactivity of the sessions helped build a stronger cohort. This paper reviews the lessons learned from the first two years and reports on the results of the third-year program implementation. 

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3. Exploring the Impact of Program Name Change on Gender Diversity in STEM

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46850  

   Zafar, Faiza; Nichol, Carolyn (June 2024, ASEE Conference)

   Gender disparities in STEM remain a pressing concern, especially in engineering, where women receive only 20% of undergraduate degrees. This concise research paper delves into the potential influence of altering the name of an undergraduate research program on attracting female applicants. Specifically, we examine how changing the program's name from "Nanotechnology Research with a Focus on Community College Students" to "Climate and Sustainability Research in Nanotechnology and Electrochemical Devices for Community College Students" affects the gender balance among applicants, with the other program components remaining the same. Our research reveals a notable shift in the applicant pool following the program's name change. Initially, we had fewer female applicants in the “Nanotechnology Research with a Focus on Community College Students” program than male students. However, following the transition to "Climate and Sustainability," the number of female applicants increased, equaling almost all male applicants. To assess the statistical significance of the observed difference, we conducted the two-sample proportion test, which resulted in a p-value of 0.233, yielding insufficient evidence of a significant difference in the proportions of female applicants between the two programs. However, an intriguing finding emerged when we focused exclusively on the "Nanotechnology" program applicants. We expect both male and female applicants to be 50% each. However, the proportion of female applicants in this group did not align with the expected 50/50 gender distribution and yielded a p-value of 0.042, suggesting that female applicants in the "Nanotechnology" applicant pool were significantly lower than 50%. While the overall comparison between the two program names did not yield statistical significance, a deeper analysis within the "Nanotechnology" program uncovered a significant difference. These findings underscore the importance of program nomenclature as a factor in promoting gender diversity in STEM education and creating a more inclusive environment for underrepresented groups in the field. 

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4. On Hiring Secretaries with Stochastic Departures

   https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2023.2476  

   Kesselheim, Thomas; Psomas, Alexandros; Vardi, Shai (May 2023, Operations Research)

   We study a generalization of the secretary problem, where decisions do not have to be made immediately upon applicants’ arrivals. After arriving, each applicant stays in the system for some (random) amount of time and then leaves, whereupon the algorithm has to decide irrevocably whether to select this applicant or not. The arrival and waiting times are drawn from known distributions, and the decision maker’s goal is to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant overall. Our first main result is a characterization of the optimal policy for this setting. We show that when deciding whether to select an applicant, it suffices to know only the time and the number of applicants that have arrived so far. Furthermore, the policy is monotone nondecreasing in the number of applicants seen so far, and, under certain natural conditions, monotone nonincreasing in time. Our second main result is that when the number of applicants is large, a single threshold policy is almost optimal. Funding: A. Psomas is supported in part by the National Science Foundation [Grant CCF-2144208], a Google Research Scholar Award, and by the Algorand Centres of Excellence program managed by Algorand Foundation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2023.2476 . 

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5. Value of Experiential Experiences for Diverse Student Populations Within Engineering Disciplines

   Stwalley, Carol S.; Stwalley, Robert M.; Baldwin, Grace L.; Booth-Womack, Virginia L.; LaRose, Sarah (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Annual Conference)

   Traditional admissions processes at top institutions predominately utilize standardized test scores when comparing student applications. The equity of these high-stakes tests most severely affects students of low socioeconomic status (SES). The NSF-sponsored program, Rising Scholars: Web of Support used as an Indicator of Success in Engineering, was created to investigate whether alternative admission criteria could be used to identify low-SES applicants who would excel within STEM fields in higher education, even if they did not have the superior standardized testing metrics preferred by current admissions process. The quality of the student’s support networks and their readiness for higher education as determined by an in-person interview with the selection committee were used as input data for a Web of Support characterization model to predict a student’s likely collegiate success at the matriculation point. There were three cohorts with a total of 21 students chosen for the program during their entry to the university which included applicants of low-SES and under-represented minority status. A significant programmatic element for these students was their involvement in experiential activities through pre-existing programs in the institution. It was reasonably assumed that the Rising Scholars student population could be positively influenced toward long-term educational commitment through experiential activities providing realistic views of professional activity. The prescribed collegiate path for these students contained an experiential educational element for each summer between admission and graduation. A summer research project with a faculty-directed laboratory before the sophomore year and a self-directed research project prior to the junior year were used to build project management experience, along with a paid, external internship in a professional organization likely to hire within the student’s major. Based upon the limited data collected so far, the researchers seem to have been conclusively demonstrated that a structured, ‘high-touch’ program with a heavy experiential component can successfully move low-SES students with STEM inclinations through a highly ranked institution. Counselling to reduce the anxiety surrounding the collegiate process for first generation students and some form of scholarship support to reduce the financial burden are both crucial underlying elements to this program’s success, but the importance of hands-on, experiential activities that help the student visualize their professional career cannot be under-estimated. 

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