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The University of Akron has had two National Science Foundation (NSF) funded science, technology, engineering and mathematics scholarship (S-STEM) programs. The cohort of the first S-STEM program (2010-2015) were students that were directly admitted to their selected discipline’s department. The current NSF S-STEM cohort (2015-2020) is a mix of students who were either directly admitted to their major or college-ready students. The university classifies college-ready students as those who are ready for college but lack either a requisite high school GPA, ACT score or completion of a high school science or math course. Each program spanned five years with science disciplines typically graduating in four years and engineering students that participated in co-operative education graduating in five years. The final year of each S- STEM was used to provide peer mentoring in a pseudo-formal environment. In each, seniors who had already participated in the S-STEM program for four years mentored new freshmen for one year. This paper will describe demographics of each S-STEM cohort, the activities used during the peer mentoring, observable differences between direct admit and college-ready freshmen with respect to peer mentoring, and possible peer mentoring activities that can be implemented at other institutions.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
United We Achieve: Mutual Support Provided by a Cohort of Institutions under the NSF EPIIC Program
In 2023, the four institutions of Kettering University, University of Northern Colorado, University of the Incarnate Word, and Western Carolina University formed the EMERGE cohort (Enabling Meaningful External Research Growth in Emergent Technologies) under the inaugural NSF Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity (EPIIC) program. Each institution in the cohort had its own plans and activities; however, the cohort also had a set of joint activities, and was encouraged under the program to provide mutual support and assistance to each other. In this paper, we set forth the goals for the cohort activities, discuss the success of the year one cohort activities, and indicate what additional benefits the cohort provided that were not planned in the grant proposal. Recommendations are provided for other institutions that may want to form similar cohorts, under this program or others.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2331219
- PAR ID:
- 10630784
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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