Stan State gets grants to bolster science participation

California State University, Stanislaus, has received two substantial grants to help students graduate in fields related to science, technology, engineering or math.

A $5.8 million U.S. Department of Education grant will go toward keeping STEM majors on track to graduate, and a $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation – shared with a Texas university – will defray costs and broaden experiences for low-income computer science students at Stanislaus State and Merced College, professors said Wednesday.

The five-year NSF grant targets low-income, academically talented students in the fields of computer science and cybersecurity, notes the award abstract. Part scholarship program, part research project, the grant is designed to find the most effective ways to recruit and retain budding cyberscientists.

The grant will focus on three cohorts of 10 students for both universities, blending coursework and professional mentorship to keep them motivated through graduation. The grant consortium is made up of two universities paired with two junior colleges: the Turlock and Merced campuses regionally, and the University of Texas at El Paso with El Paso Community College in Texas.

Scholarships will start at $5,000 a year for four Merced College students and $7,500 a year for six Stanislaus State computer science majors, said professor Melanie Martin, lead in the local grant. Scholarships rise in upper division, ending with $10,000 for senior year.

“I taught a student who was performing well in classes, and suddenly his grades started to fall,” Martin said. “I asked him why his performance had changed. He told me he’d recently gotten a job to support himself and that his work schedule was interfering with his classes and homework. It’s a problem that many students face.”

Participants will take part in research activities, mentoring with local professors and travel each year to the Great Minds in STEM summit. The grant’s cybersecurity component will create more offerings in that field at the Turlock campus, which now serves roughly 300 computer science majors, Martin said.

The larger USDE grant will focus on lower-division and first-year transfer students in all STEM majors, said Mark Grobner, dean of the College of Science.

“We find two-thirds of students who come to the college in STEM disciplines don’t graduate in a STEM discipline,” he said. Most of those students shift to other majors, in part because they were not well-prepared for the tough courses, he said, but a lot of them say they drifted away because they felt no connection.

To tackle that problem, the grant will fund a summer STEM Success program in 2017 for 32 incoming freshmen and 20 transfer students. Freshmen will live in the dorms and get extra sessions on campus services and study help. All will get a taste of campus life and meet professors doing projects.

“It’s a pilot. We’re hoping, if we see things that work well, we can expand it and institutionalize it so it sticks around,” Grobner said. “(Former students said) they didn’t feel like part of the college of science. This is an effort to make them feel invested.”

Another aspect of the grant will counsel interested students at Modesto Junior College and other feeder schools in taking transferable early courses.

“We find they don’t take the prerequisites. They come here with the units of junior, but they’re really still freshmen because they didn’t take our sequence,” he said. “Students come here thinking they’re going to get done in two years, but if they’re not ready to jump into upper division there’s no way they’re going to get done.”

A similar push using an earlier grant helped Merced College students, Grobner said.

“It used to be that only 10 percent of (Merced College transfer) students came prepared when they entered our STEM programs. Now we’re seeing 40 to 60 percent,” he said.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 5:23 PM with the headline "Stan State gets grants to bolster science participation."