Early Career Exploration Community for Biology and Chemistry Students

About This Grant

This Capacity-Building Institutional and Community Transformation project aims to serve the national interest by creating an early career exploration community for biology and chemistry students ("ExploreBCC") at the Stevens Institute of Technology (Stevens) in collaboration with Hudson County Community College (HCCC). College students who are well educated in the fields of biology and chemistry are crucial for continued innovation and development in various sectors of the U.S. economy, including agriculture, biotechnology, energy, environment, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing. ExploreBCC intends to empower first-year students to: (1) investigate the various career pathways that are possible via biology and chemistry; (2) assess their own interests through interactions with external career role models, faculty leaders, and academic advisors; and (3) connect their academic plan with career aspiration. Developing and propagating ExploreBCC, that guides students for thoughtful and strategic career choices, should serve as a meaningful model for STEM education. This project is significant for its potential to cultivate the nation's scientific workforce as well as to prepare it for rapidly evolving real-world roles that must respond to new societal challenges while adopting emerging technology such as artificial intelligence. The scope of this project is to start building ExploreBCC on the existing knowledge base, which indicates increasing self-efficacy around science careers and identity. The project should provide students with a guided opportunity to: (1) build self-confidence, (2) understand their abilities, and (3) align their actions with their expected career outcomes. ExploreBCC intends to bring a novel combination of synergistic and structured learning, networking, and planning experiences at the outset of the students' academic path. ExploreBCC aims to leverage the recruitment and cultivation of career role models, (1) who are professional volunteers working in various economic sectors and (2) who will engage first-year students about rapidly evolving real-world science careers and identity. This structured approach is anchored by a first-semester, one credit-hour course at Stevens. Preliminary data indicate that the course provides students with an important opportunity to question, realign, and/or confirm their chosen major at the earliest stage of their academic journey. In this Capacity-Building Project, the course will be updated and made available to first-year students at HCCC. The specific objectives of the project are to: (1) assess the learning experience, effectiveness, and outcomes of pilot ExploreBCC activities for two student cohorts at Stevens and HCCC; (2) recruit and cultivate career role models, faculty leaders, and academic advisors with emphasis on developing relationships with various campus units and leaders at Stevens and HCCC; and (3) plan and develop the multi-institutional framework for implementation and evaluation of ExploreBCC for its sustainable and scalable propagation. Results from this project are expected to provide new insight in rethinking and transforming the first-year student experience in four-year and two-year colleges. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.