About the Purdue Rising Scholars Program
About the Purdue Rising Scholars Program
The Rising Scholar program was created using an NSF S-STEM grant. This program offers a high touch pathway through the university for low socioeconomic status (low-SES) students who originally desired an engineering degree but were denied admission into engineering. Students in good standing with the program can receive up to a $9,000 per year scholarship. The research taking place within the program is trying to establish that a strong adult support network is a better predictor of success for these low-SES students than test scores or high school metrics.
The pathway through the university was designed to allow frequent interaction with professors, university staff, and graduate students who can be added to the student’s network of mentors. The first activity for each cohort together is the MEP Academic Boot Camp. This program simulates first semester classes for the students. There are also team building activities and a five-week project, which helps the students find friends and study partners for the balance of their academic careers at Purdue.
Once a year, there is a one-credit seminar which brings the Rising Scholar students together and discusses issues from their previous summer activity and prepares them for the coming year. Each fall and spring, the Rising Scholars take a survey which asks them to provide their current social support networks and find out about how they use these people to approach problems in their life and how satisfied are they in their career plans.
The Rising Scholars perform research in a professor’s laboratory in their desired field through the LSAMP Research Program during the summer before their sophomore year. The students then perform a self-directed research project during the following summer that could be a continuation of their prior research or a new topic. The seminars provide review periods so that the students can reflect and improve their research papers for these two levels of research. Rising seniors then look for an internship within industry to provide positive work experiences as they begin to look for post-collegiate employment. Although the data collected thus far is small, it seems to indicate with statistical significance that the Rising Scholars are outperforming general admission students in GPA and retention. The researchers are hopeful that the program can be expanded into a multi-university test of the social network concepts.