Supporting Students’ Academic and Career Success with a Sustainable Energy Focus

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Temple University. Temple is a public university in an urban setting, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, serving approximately 30,000 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate students.

Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 34 unique full time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering. First year students will receive four-year scholarships. The Sustainable Temple Energy and Power Scholars (STEPS) project will provide focused peer, faculty, and industry mentoring that will support scholars through to graduation.

Of critical importance to the proposed project is the participation of 13 local industry partners interested in providing job placements to qualified scholars who graduate and facilitating professional development opportunities during their academic career. While efforts are primarily focused on enrolling and supporting S-STEM scholars, the STEPS project will ultimately contribute to building a college-wide framework to increase diversity and student success in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department and the college of engineering beyond the S-STEM award.

The potential to change the perception of what is possible regarding college and careers for the scholars' families and community provides added impact. Additionally, STEPS' local industry contacts can be leveraged by other nearby institutions to improve the pipeline of qualified STEM graduates into the local STEM workforce.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. To achieve this overall goal, the project will work to accomplish three objectives: (1) increase enrollment into ECE of low-income, academically talented students by implementing a holistic, targeted recruitment plan that leverages industry partnerships and uses existing ECE students as peer role models; (2) increase retention and graduation rates in ECE of low-income, academically talented students by engaging them in a suite of evidence-based curricular and co-curricular activities infused with industry collaboration, and by providing support services for learning; and (3) systematically support student career pathways in STEM, using internships and industry mentorship as cornerstones.

STEPS will use the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as a conceptual framework to gain a better understanding of factors that influence students’ academic and career choice and persistence. The research plan intends to use mainly qualitative analysis to accomplish this to fill a gap in the literature that is mainly based on quantitative studies.

A robust process and outcomes evaluation will be employed to monitor and document program planning and implementation, which should aid in understanding the relationship(s) between specific program elements and intended program outcomes for the STEPS scholars. The analytic framework for evaluating the project consists of planning-process-outcome analyses from start to finish.

Dissemination of the project results will include an implementation guide, a workshop on lessons learned to be delivered locally and at national conferences, peer reviewed conference/journal articles, and visits to other local institutions of higher education. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields.

The program also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.