Thanks to a grant from the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, a program called STEM Success will help students who are interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers but may not have gotten the education necessary in High School.
According to Sekhar Chivukula of the College of Natural Science, students coming in to the STEM majors that have to back track to the courses they didn't take in High School are much less likely to graduate with a STEM degree. When this grant came about, Chivukula says they realized, “It was the perfect opportunity to develop a program that would give them the skills they needed to succeed (in these careers).”
The program will offer online summer programming that will refresh and review the student’s math skills, it will start integrating them into the community before they reach campus and help them improve their study skills. They are also hiring back peer mentors that completed the STEM programs successfully to offer mentoring.
Students that graduate with a STEM degree have very low unemployment rates. Depending on the degree, over 90 percent of students are hired, or enter graduate school, within a year after graduation. Besides the technical skills, Chivukula says “It’s important we teach them how to persist, and persevere.”
Source: Sekhar Chivukula, College of Natural Science
?Author: Allison Monroe, Innovation News Editor
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