Poster Abstracts

Syracuse University

The Central New York – Puerto Rico AGEP

M. Glauser, P. Stith, D. Freund, S. Tice and G. Lee-Glauser
Syracuse University
L. Castillo and T. Apple
RPI
A. Estevez
UPRM
Z. Warhaft, C. Bustamante and F. Valero Cuevas
Cornell University

In this age of accelerated technological advances, increasing career specialization and extremely competitive job opportunities, society has a vested interest in promoting graduate and professional education in the STEM areas as never before. The need for specialized knowledge and the acquisition of professional credentials place increasingly high demands on all college graduates, yet documented evidence shows that there exists a disparity in the opportunities for certain populations to gain access to programs conferring advanced degrees in science, mathematics and engineering. Member institutions in the alliance spearheaded by Syracuse University with the collaboration of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University, and Puerto Rico-Mayaguez called the Central New York to Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (CNY-PR) are confronting the challenge of making graduate study in the STEM disciplines more available to reportedly underrepresented populations through our NSF funded AGEP.

The CNY-PR alliance is based on mutual commitment to research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty development programs in an environment where recruitment, retention and mentoring are essential. The CNY-PR alliance brings valuable experience and resources for the enhancement of minority graduate education that contributes to the diversification of the professoriate. The CNY-PR alliance uses holistic approaches to substantially increase minority STEM Ph.D. degree recipients entering academic positions. The CNY-PR alliance is implementing the following to achieve its goals:

• Provide inter-institutional engaging research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students
• Review and recommend innovative measures and guidelines for graduate admission criteria
• Aggressively recruit and retain excellent minority students to the alliance institutions
• Provide multi-year funding package for accepted minority graduate students
• Expand professoriate and mentor training programs (currently in place at SU) to alliance institutions
• Develop and implement continuous assessment tools to evaluate the alliance’s objectives

Each component of the program builds on the previous, creating a corridor the student moves through that motivates, guides, and supports them from K-12 to Ph.D. to a successful career in academia or industry.