An Intrusive Research Mentoring Program in Remote Sensing for Undergraduate Minority Students

Increasing the participation of underrepresented minority students in STEM research is an even more dire imperative now than it was a decade ago. Recent studies have shown that for STEM in general and for atmospheric sciences in particular, this group of students continues to lag far behind other groups in recruitment, enrollment, retention, and graduation rates. With varying degrees of success, many best practice strategies have been implemented to address and to ameliorate this problem; however, the plight yet persists. Research mentoring for minority students has a multitude of benefits that include: increased confidence, deeper understanding of the content and the context of scientific inquiry, enhanced career preparation and clarification, and being part of a community of scholars. Another additional benefit is persistence in STEM. For the past decade, an intrusive research mentoring program has been administered in an NSF REU program at the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. This multi-faceted, tiered mentoring system has since guided more than one hundred undergraduate students (78% of whom were underrepresented minority students) to either graduate school, the STEM workforce, or to persisting with their STEM undergraduate degrees. This presentation shares the model and the results of this intrusive mentoring program. This adoptable and adaptable program engages both two-year and four-year undergraduates, and it has been proven successful in engaging minority STEM students in atmospheric science.