NSF S-STEM Program - Supporting Undergraduate Cohorts of Career-Ready Engineering and Science Scholars (SUCCESS) Project at WVU Tech – Year 2 updates

Abstract

The SUCCESS project’s main goal is to recruit, retain, and graduate low-income STEM students at WVU Tech and this abstract contains updates for Year 2. The recruitment activities started in early 2021 and continued during the summer of 2021 to form Cohort 1 and during the summer of 2022 to form Cohort 2. Currently, there are 19 scholars/students in the program. 12 new students (10 Computer Science (CS) and 2 Information Systems (IS) majors) were accepted in Fall 2022 and these 12 students are forming Cohort 2. 6 students were accepted into Electrical Engineering (EE) (4), Computer Engineering (CpE) (1), and CS (1) programs in Fall 2021. 2 EE and 1 CS students entered the program in Spring 2022. Two students (both EEs) stopped out of school for mainly their personal issues. These 7 students are forming Cohort 1. So far, scholars have completed at least one entrepreneurship course, attended career fairs, met with industry mentors, and attended senior design presentation events. Some of the scholars work with faculty on research projects. Students are actively engaging with the IEEE/ACM student branches and some of the scholars took leadership positions in these organizations. The SUCCESS team is regularly collecting and analyzing feedback from scholars to ensure that the necessary improvements are implemented. Every semester, scholars’ feedback is collected through pre-, mid-, and post-surveys. These surveys provide insights into scholars’ course/program performance, career updates, and also the level of persistence toward their program of study and entrepreneurship minor. This project is funded by NSF DUE S-STEM Program from 2021-2026.