Impacts of the NSF-Funded ACES S-STEM Project on Atmospheric Sciences Students at a Public Liberal Arts University

The scholarship project funded by NSF (S-STEM, Division of Undergraduate Education) has been active in the Atmospheric Sciences and Computer Science Departments at UNC Asheville (UNCA) since 2015. Aside from the financial incentive to persist in a challenging major, several opportunities associated with the project have been implemented at UNCA to provide support and a sense of community in order to improve retention of first year students in the two departments. The presentation will focus on implementation specifics of the ACES Project ( http://www.aces.unca.edu/aces.shtml ) and its design to overcome significant challenges illuminated by assessment of pre-project students. Current and future adjustments of the project in response to an assortment of unanticipated difficulties at the halfway point of the project will also be described. As the first scholarship student cohort makes its way through the upper-level atmospheric sciences coursework 'gauntlet,' specific milestones requiring examination will be defined in the presentation that will determine overall project effectiveness.