For more information
Cynthia Lanius, lanius@cs.rice.edu
Between 1994 and 1995, only 0.4 percent of all master's and 0.3 percent of all doctorates went to American Indians; 0.6 percent of all master's and 0.3 percent of all doctorates went to African-Americans; and 3.2 percent of all master's and 2.2 percent of all doctorates went to Hispanics, according to the U.S. Department of Education.These statistics are replicated almost exactly within engineering and computer science, where 0.4 of doctorates went to American Indians, 2.2 percent to African Americans, and 2.9 percent to Hispanics. Few minority students enroll in graduate programs. Even fewer go on to complete their graduate degrees.
SaS Participants Engage in Pyramids of MentoringAt a workshop for high school students, a Rice University Computer Science graduate student stresses that college success will require 100% effort while others prepare to speak. (Image courtesy of Jeff Fitlow). |
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In 1989, Richard Tapia created the Spend a Summer with a Scientist (SaS) to increase the number of ethnic minorities and women in mathematics, the computational sciences, and engineering. Tapia is the director of education and human resources at the Center for Research in Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice University and the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Science. For three years, the program operated solely as a summer undergraduate research program for minority students. The intention was to introduce undergraduates to research in an academic setting and give them confidence in their research skills, thereby encouraging them to attend graduate school. In this sense, SaS was similar to many other institutional and national programs designed to encourage minorities to pursue graduate study.
Working closely with graduate students at CRPC, though, Tapia realized that choosing to go to graduate school was only one hurdle; persisting through their studies was perhaps even more difficult. In 1992, SaS was modified to include minority graduate students at Rice. In 1995, the program also began to include white females. In its current form, SaS creates a persistent community that provides support and encouragement to participants throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers.
While the participants' demographics have changed over the years, the structure of SaS has remained essentially the same. Students are given financial support to participate in a research project under a mentor/advisor who is a faculty member at Rice . The research topic, degree of difficulty, and amount of structure are adjusted to fit each student's needs, whether a graduate student completing dissertation research or an undergraduate from a small college who has never done research before. Students who need to catch up or prepare for upcoming courses may have a program tailored to meet their needs. At the end of the summer participants give an account of their activities.
The overarching SaS program goal is upheld by a series of supporting goals, chief among them being the development of a community. "SaS surrounds students with caring people and opportunities to both give and receive assistance," says Tapia. "The more senior students look out for those more junior. They learn that others below them are counting on them to succeed, and that element of community responsibility brings with it powerful motivation."
Community is built through Friday seminars where SaS participants discuss issues of research and professional development, race and gender, and problems or issues that have come up during the week. The weekly seminar is an opportunity to get to know and respect each other and to learn what it means to be an academic, a researcher, and a minority in one's field. The Friday meetings also provide a forum for Tapia to discuss the unspoken rules and customs of the academic culture, helping to socialize the students into their chosen field.
From his own experience as a a minority in computing, Tapia felt it was important to counteract students' feelings that they have disappointed or turned their backs on their ethnic community by joining an academic one. Providing an opportunity to reach out to people with similar backgrounds is therefore an important part of SaS. For two weeks in the summer, SaS participants mentor high school students from two Houston-area schools, and give workshop presentations to K-12 teachers who work with minority students.
The representation of all levels of education in the SaS program creates a scenario ripe for pyramids of mentoring. The philosophy--originally conceived by the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research and the basis of their mentoring programs--is that participants respond most positively to mentoring from an individual who is just one step higher than they are on the academic ladder. Following this tenet, while Tapia as project director works with the entire SaS program, as a senior faculty member and mentor he works most closely with senior graduate students. They in turn mentor junior graduate students, who mentor undergraduates. The whole SaS community works with the high school students. "This reinforces the SaS community because you are looked to for leadership even as you seek support and advice from those who're further into their education than you," Tapia says.
Significantly, Tapia also steps in at times and serves as an advocate on behalf of students with the university, department administration, or other faculty, a role he can play because of his status as a senior faculty member.
The SaS program recently became one of the first EOT-PACI affiliated projects to be evaluated by the Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination (LEAD) Center of the University of Wisconsin as part of LEAD's PACI participation (see below). The results of LEAD's evaluation indicate that the program is astonishingly successful in motivating its participants to attend graduate school and persist through their studies. Subsequently, the program format may soon be replicated at other locations around the country, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Following LEAD's delineation of program characteristics that bring about SaS's success, subsequent programs nationwide could eventually have an even deeper impact on the representation of women and minorities in the sciences and computing.
The LEAD Center's evaluation of the Spend a Summer with a Scientist (SaS) program at Rice University established the effectiveness of this research and professional development program with respect to the recruitment of minority undergraduates into graduate school and the retention of minority graduate students at Rice University.
Tracking of student academic outcomes, and interviews and surveys with student participants demonstrated not only that SaS participants are enrolling in graduate school and obtaining graduate degrees at an unusually high rate, but also that most of these participants feel the program had a powerful impact on their decisions about and success in pursuing advanced degrees. A number of them asserted that they would not have completed their degrees--or thought to enroll in graduate school at all--had it not been for their participation in the Spend a Summer with a Scientist program.
For undergraduate participants who have since graduated, 63 percent enrolled in graduate school, while 33 percent gained employment in mathematics, computational science, or engineering. For graduate student participants, the rate of retention so far is 97 percent, with just one student having left graduate school without a degree. A total of 57 percent of these participants are still in graduate school making steady progress toward their degrees, and of those who have already graduated with advanced degrees, two-thirds have received Ph.D.'s.