The CSULB BUILD Scholars Program: A Research-Intensive Upper-Division Program to Broaden and Diversify the Behavioral and Biomedical Research Workforce.

Abstract

Engaging undergraduates in research is a high impact practice shown to increase underrepresented students' persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields and entry into research careers. The California State University Long Beach (CSULB) BUilding Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Scholars Program is a 2-year, upper-division research training program. Although similar research training programs exist, most admit relatively few students a year, primarily from the natural sciences. The BUILD award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed us to broaden research training to a wider range of health-related disciplines across four different colleges to have more even representation across the behavioral and biomedical science disciplines. Our Scholars Program builds upon best practices of programmatic mentoring, assets-based and cohort-based training, financial and educational support, and intensive research training by faculty in the students' disciplines. In this paper, we present the outcomes and evaluation of our training program with data from the first phase of the BUILD award (2015-2019). Findings demonstrate that our Scholars Program was effective at recruiting and retaining underrepresented students from a broad range of disciplines. Moreover, our trainees demonstrated a high level of research engagement through off-campus summer research experiences, conference presentations, and publications. The intensive training in the Scholars Program also yielded high graduate school acceptance rates for our trainees. Most importantly, our findings show that it is possible to broaden an intensive undergraduate research training program that is similarly effective for trainees across behavioral and biomedical disciplines, underrepresented minority status, and gender. While we highlight several elements of our training program, we emphasize these components likely work together interactively, and institutions wanting to establish a similar training program need to ensure sufficient resources for its successful implementation.