The U.S. National Science Foundation is committed to expanding opportunities in STEM to people of all racial, ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as persons with disabilities.
The agency values diversity and inclusion, demonstrates integrity and excellence in its devotion to public service, and prioritizes innovation and collaboration in support of the scientific community's work.
While broadening participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is included in NSF's merit review criteria, some programs go beyond the standard review criteria. These investments — which make up NSF's Broadening Participation Portfolio — use different approaches to build STEM education and research capacity, catalyze new areas of research and develop strategic partnerships and alliances. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is one such program dedicated to this investment.
On June 4, 2024, NRT program staff and three NRT principal investigators hosted a webinar that provided effective strategies for broadening participation for STEM graduate students. The webinar targeted current and prospective NRT principal investigators, as well as those seeking to increase graduate student diversity in a variety of STEM fields.
Participants were able to engage directly with the three NRT principal investigators whose projects include:
- Enhancing Resiliency and Increasing Equity in the Transition to a Sustainable Energy Future, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- NRT: NNA: Tamamta (All of Us): Transforming Western and Indigenous Fisheries and Marine Sciences Together, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
- NRT: Sustainable Oceans: From Policy to Science to Decisions, University of California, Davis.
Below are overviews of their individual programs, as well as a portion of the Q&A discussion that took place during the webinar.
Presentation 1 overview: University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Demystifying the application process.
- Using sustainability and positive social impact as an attraction for all students.
- Using games as a tool for convergence and teamwork.
Our project coordinator worked on a comprehensive guide for applying to graduate school in her previous role. With their permission, we have adapted that guide and feature it prominently on our website. We highlight this guide to try and make the process for applying to graduate school as frictionless as possible. Applying to graduate school can be complicated, and there are many unwritten rules and expectations. If you do not have this knowledge or institutional knowledge, students may be disproportionately penalized by this process.
We also tried to integrate equity concepts into our NRT topic of energy transition to get students excited about what we are doing. On one project, we focus on carbon capture technology and how that affects pollution, especially in low-income neighborhoods. On another project we investigate subsidies for decarbonizing heating and how that can be done in the most equitable way. Our research is geared toward making students as excited and engaged as possible, looking at the social impact of these projects.
The last strategy we stumbled on came from our project occurring within COVID. We were faced with the task of trying to develop convergence among faculty and graduate students over Zoom. While Zoom is great for many things, it is not great for building a team when many of the participants do not know each other well. We decided to make our Zoom meetings as fun and interesting as possible. I love playing games, including board games. For our first meeting, instead of having a fantasy football draft, we had a draft of decarbonization technologies. The teams had to draft the different technologies, and we debated which ones were better, and then we got a score at the end. It was just a fun way to make a Zoom meeting less boring. It turned out this approach was a nice way to run our meetings and promote convergence among our team, to build consensus, to build teamwork, to take different perspectives. We built on this and have developed more elaborate meetings structured around games, but with a strong technical or policy focus that lets us learn about the topic.
Presentation 2 overview: University of Alaska Fairbanks
- Centering our program around relationality as a key goal and a way that we operate.
- Working with our faculty, particularly non-native faculty, to provide holistic mentorships.
- Setting up a cohort model where we do a lot of land based getting to know each other out on the land as a collective and as a cohort.
- Doing the hard work in our institution of shifting some of the norms to better serve the students and those from the community.
Many of our students have come in because they know and are in a relationship. Their communities are in relationship with our faculty with our institution. Many of them said they never would have considered graduate school if such a program did not exist. We have a lot of relationality in terms of how we attract students and how they know that they'll be well cared for in our program.
Our project coordinator and postdoctoral fellow is a primary mentor for all our students. We found an important need to do deep work with our faculty, particularly non-native faculty, who don't have the background, experience and skill set to offer holistic mentorships. We've been doing a lot of training and dialogue and deep work with our allied faculty.
All our classes are focused on a first-year cohort model that has been important for our retention as well as success for the students that we do attract with.
One small area of change was removing roadblocks for how we pay elders who participate in the classroom. The norm involved delays and paperwork requirements. We also worked with our state and federal partners to recognize the Indigenous knowledge systems.
Presentation 3 overview: University of California, Davis
- Our partnership with California State University was a novel thing that we incorporated from the beginning. It allowed us to recruit from a wider pool.
- We used a lot of resources and pulled on a lot of networks of our faculty. We had also had a lot of experiences on campus with IGERTS and partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities. We utilized these relationships and leveraged them to get the word out on our program.
- We tailored some of the recruitment process to recruit first-year master's students in a two-year program and designated a co-principal investigator to oversee the recruitment process.
We did a lot of outreach to California State University MA students, and they applied to our program. We admitted about three to four students each year, and they received a stipend to participate. To broaden participation, we knew it was not going to just happen recruiting our students. We designated a co-PI who oversaw recruitment throughout the project, and we used our relationships with NSF programs and faculty across the different graduate groups.
Our program targeted Ph.D. students, which is important when you think about recruitment. Although there was a special one-page application for the sustainable oceans program, they were applying to graduate school and all those different programs first and foremost. We thought of ourselves as a "Ph.D.+," where the sustainable oceans NRT was that plus. We required CSU scholar program students to be in the first year of a master's program, and the program had to be a two-year program. In addition, they had to include some information in the statement of purpose.
We developed a rubric to help evaluate and normalize our reviews of the applications, and this rubric was refined over time. We received 25 to 30 applications per year with about 15 to 20 getting admissions to our graduate program. We also assigned faculty mentors to those we accepted into the program. We selected around 12 applicants for interviews and then provided six offers for funding per year. Additionally, we provided several mentoring programs, including peer-mentoring, co-mentoring and mentoring across cohorts.
Q: Did your recruitment strategies change after the first year and for subsequent years in your NRT? If so, did your evaluation activities inform these changes? And we can't speak about recruitment without also discussing retention. What retention strategies have you used, and which have you found to be effective in your NRT Grant?
Response 1: We found more people on campus doing research connected to our energy transition topic than we first realized. The breadth of disciplines on our campus was wider than what we originally started with. While having these new interactions is not a recruitment strategy, it created a snowball effect with the ability to recruit students from programs and departments we had not initially envisioned.
We believe giving our trainees the opportunity to be in leadership roles has had a greater impact than we anticipated. While we do not want to overburden the students, we include in our plan opportunities where the trainees can be given leadership roles. This allows them to take ownership and feel passionate about their work. Overall, it provides a lot of excitement for them.
Response 2: During our first year we worried whether we would attract enough applicants. As a result, we used many approaches to recruiting, including using social media and personal networks. In the second year, we had so many students reaching out to us who heard of the program through word of mouth within their relationships. They saw others who were part of the program with similar backgrounds and reasons for coming into a graduate program. Our outreach became more tailored to support the needs of those students who were attracted to the program. We attracted students of Indigenous backgrounds as well as allied students who saw the training and credentialling being provided as valuable for uplifting their Indigenous knowledge systems.
We are still thinking about and refining how best we include retention strategies in our program. We found the cohort model to be helpful as students in each tend to lean on each other and share a lot of their experience. The focus of our program coordinator is mentorship. We have other administrative staff helping with logistics, which frees up our coordinator's time to work as a full-time mentor to our students. We find this to be very important as many Indigenous students may need the emotional support and helps them navigate through the graduate education program.
Q: Could you elaborate on the group interviews you conducted when you were recruiting trainees, how they worked, and why you found this useful?
A: We were interested in building a cohort that could interact across their disciplines. We were also really interested in the dynamic of the cohorts, and how those dynamics would evolve through time through our program. This group interview approach is something that evolved. During the first year of the NRT we held standard one-person interviews. Due to COVID, we changed this approach and began having groups of five or six together where we would ask them questions. In that setting they could see the other students, some of them with similar backgrounds. It was powerful for them to hear the answers of other students to our questions. It was great to see and hear their interaction with each other. We thought the group dynamics and interactions were important for the culture and retention of the students.
Q: Can you speak to any strategies you tried that you did not find to be effective or did not work well or as well?
A: We have sent students to conferences, sometimes with flyers to advertise the program, and sometimes we've had a table. It is not clear to me that this strategy yielded many applicants. It may be due to the small sample sizes at these conferences. However, I was hopeful that attendance at conferences and having the students bring advertised materials would yield more results, and so far, personal connections have been more effective.
Q: What type of curriculum or training did you use to prepare graduate students to engage with the community? How did you prepare to get them out there and interact with the specific communities with your projects?
Response 1: Our students are unique in that many of our students come directly from their community into our institutions. So, there was a need on our part to have partnerships with those communities. It was important to have more connection between universities and communities, and we have a lot. We have partnerships with Indigenous scholars across the country. We find this to be important as we have a long legacy of research in Alaska that has not served the communities well. For this reason, we have been concerned about the kind of continued extraction of data or knowledge without good reciprocity. We are trying to help students center research so that it serves the community and that data, which may or may not be appropriate to share, are protected.
Response 2: Almost all our trainees take either a community engagement research course or a public engagement class. The public engagement course is more about communicating science to the public. The community engagement research source is more about doing research in the community. We have been fortunate to have courses that are available for any student doing research in this area to get those skills. We agree that field trips and internships are quite important. We learned it was too late to have these experiences at the end of the program. We included one-day field trips during the first year in the first quarter of their graduate program. They were used as trial field trips where they would meet and work on their community engagement.
We also held weekly lab meetings where we brought in outside speakers. One of the goals was to get the students used to the idea of listening, which is the most important form of communication. They also learned about forming questions and engaging with community members. We tried to provide community engagement slowly throughout the program.
Q: What are some successful strategies for sustaining your programs beyond the duration of NSF funding? Or can you speak to some of the ways that you are seeking to institutionalize some of the changes, especially those around broadening participation at your institutions?
Response 1: One thing we were able to get at the start of the grant was commitments for a range of matching fellowships from some of the participating colleges and from the graduate school. The graduate school has some fellowships for underrepresented students which may be helpful as we try to sustain broadening participation. One of our goals is essentially to try to continue those commitments of funding even after the funding runs out.
Response 2: Our program has become a shining gem in our institution and our leadership is excited about this. Because of that, we hope we will get some direct funding from our institution to continue the work we have begun. The program's success is built on deep relationships and a commitment to the work. Our evaluation showed that initially 10%-20% of our faculty saw our work as fulfilling a need. Now that number is up to 95% for our faculty who completed the survey. This buy-in is good and at the core of what we are trying to do, affecting how we teach and do research. In addition, there are also philanthropic organizations and foundations who believe in the model and the program. We have an advisory committee of amazing leaders that are always speaking about our program. These are all potential vehicles for sustaining funding.