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East Carolina University (ECU) was funded by a multi-institutional Track 3 S-STEM Grant #1930497 in January 2020. The funds from this grant have been used to recruit and support three cohorts of students at ECU and three partnering community colleges. The project is referred to internally as the PIRATES project for Providing Inclusive Residential and Transfer Engineering Support. In addition to funding scholarships, the research aim of this project uses Lee and Matusovich’s Model of Co-Curricular Support for Undergraduate Engineering Students [1] to study best practices in co-curricular support for both students who start their pathway towards an engineering degree at a university and students whose higher education academic pathway began at a community college. Major goals of the project include building a sense of belonging and an engineering identity among students both within and across cohorts and institutions. One of the ways that this project has worked to encourage student retention and persistence in engineering is through engineering design challenges coupled with related presentations from speakers working in a variety of engineering careers. The goals of these events are to showcase the many opportunities engineering students have and the many ways that engineers work to solve local and global issues by having students engage in small engineering projects that can be completed in one day and showcasing how those projects relate to a broader field of engineering. The projects extend the experiences students have in various engineering courses and labs and introduce some technical skills that students may not develop in traditional classrooms and lab courses. This paper will highlight the design problems posed to students during single-day design activities in which students from all cohorts and participating institutions were invited to work in teams to tackle design challenges. Student teams were purposefully assigned to get students working together who attend different institutions and are in different graduating classes to create mentoring opportunities for less experienced students to learn from more experienced students. Emphasis is also placed on how students were introduced to career opportunities related to the design challenges by recruiting alumni from the partnering institutions to speak on the work they do and how their educational pathways prepared them for diverse careers. This paper will also discuss survey and focus group interview data from students participating in these activities to showcase how the activities may have helped to expand their knowledge of opportunities available to engineers in a variety of fields. 

With a project built on the Model of Co-Curricular Support for Undergraduate Engineering Students, in collaboration with three partnering community colleges was awarded a Multi-Institutional Track 3 S-STEM Grant in January 2020. The intention of the project was to recruit 2 cohorts of scholars with 40 students each. One cohort was to start their pursuit of an engineering degree in Fall 2020 and the other in Fall 2021. Each cohort was to be comprised of 20 students who started at as freshmen and 20 students who intended to get an associate’s degree from one of the partnering community colleges and transfer to a university to complete the BS in engineering. Despite some early challenges in recruiting students and implementing planned programs due to the Covid-19 pandemic, three cohorts of low-income students have been recruited and supported by scholarships valued at up to $10,000 per year. In addition to scholarship support, various other support mechanisms have been implemented including a week-long summer bridge program for incoming students, a peer mentoring program, a textbook lending library, faculty mentoring, and various collaborative programs involving career speakers, design challenges, and professional development opportunities. With the first cohort of students now entering their senior year and several community college students having already transferred to the university, this paper discusses the recruitment and retention of scholars, details of program activities, and the progress scholars have made towards an engineering degree. This paper also draws comparisons between the scholar cohorts and all students entering the engineering program in the same semester in order to identify differences in GPA and retention.