The previous grant, awarded in 2016, included a suite of strategies to help first-year students, including the Pathways program that offers workshops on life skills, peer mentoring, intrusive advising and cohort enrollment. Those strategies were successful, giving students the tools they needed to succeed throughout their time at CSUB and graduate on time. Still, Dr. McBride and Dr. Lam wondered what else the school could do to support students.
“We were talking about what we wanted to do to improve the quality of the programs,” Dr. Lam said. “For the new grant, one of the focuses is on career-development, developing a STEM workforce for the country. We’re focusing on what possible careers STEM majors can pursue and helping to develop internships and educate students and the community about STEM careers in our region.”
The grant, which officially begins on Oct. 1, will include hiring an outreach coordinator and community college liaison, bilingual family workshops to talk about school and future careers, collaboration with Bakersfield College to remove any remaining transfer barriers, a first-year seminar to introduce NSME students to different majors, and a speaker series highlighting the experiences of CSUB alumni, particularly those from underrepresented groups.
“We believe that the community is not well-informed about the diversity of STEM careers here, that they feel like they would have to go somewhere else to work,” Dr. Lam said. “That’s a hurdle for students to get into STEM majors.”
Another focus of the grant is on helping students get the kind of real-world experience that makes them competitive in the job market after college. It will create a STEM internship and career coordinator position within CSUB’s Center for Career Education and Community Engagement, develop undergraduate research programs for students who are thinking about graduate school or research careers and create a framework to build relationships with local employers.
Though the grant is specifically for schools with a large Latino population, these programs will be open to help all students succeed.
“We know Kern County has a high innovation capacity and we are not yet living up to that potential,” Dr. Lam said. “This grant will help CSUB to be the institute of change for this area. There is a serious equity gap in the STEM workforce in the entire country. CSUB being an HSI, we have a great opportunity to use these funds to help close the gap.”