The SUNY Cortland Robert Noyce Project launched a new approach to recruiting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) majors. We have created a semester long freshmen orientation class that introduces STEM majors to different careers in STEM. This presentation details the various online resources created and collated for this class.
The SUNY Cortland Robert Noyce Project launched a new approach to recruiting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) majors. We have created a semester long freshmen orientation class that introduces STEM majors to different careers in STEM. This presentation details with the various online resources created and collated for this class.
The State University of New York College at Cortland has received multiple federal grants to explore best practices in preparing and supporting future STEM teachers. Faculty from Adolescence Education, Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics have been working on this project for nearly ten years. The project has awarded more than 70 years of scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students. Nearly 90% of our project’s alumni remain teaching in rural high needs school districts throughout the East Coast
In an effort to recruit more students into the STEM fields and potentially increase the numbers of students willing to consider a career (or shorter term job) a section of the freshmen seminar class was created. SUNY Cortland has all incoming freshmen complete a one-semester one-credit class called COR 101: the Cortland Experience. There are approximately 10 different specialized cohorts for students studying different majors or topic areas. There are specialized programs for students studying economics, geology, early childhood education, the physical sciences, among others.
The goals of COR 101 are:
1. Orientation to Cortland: Learning about our community, policies, and procedures
2. Transitions: Understand and negotiate the transition to college
3. Academic Success: Utilize academic and campus resources (including understanding academic planning and the registration process, identifying different ways students learn, and relating career paths to academics)
4. Diversity Equity Inclusion: Understand and appreciate multiple perspectives
5. Personal Wellness: Develop critical thinking and responsible decisions-making skills (keeping a balanced, healthy and resourceful way of living)
The goals for the STEM Careers learning community followed this overall goals and paid specific attention to Goal 3. Ordinarily students are introduced to various offices and support groups on campus including the career services center as part of COR. In the STEM Careers COR 101 section, we focus on this aspect of college life as a central theme. Many of the activities that the class completed were anchored by this idea: “What will your career will be?”
Students that are just starting their college career may not know what career they want to complete nor do they necessarily really know what is involved with certain careers especially in the STEM fields. At the same time, they may also not realize which careers they can undertake with a STEM degree in hand. The first step for this group is an activity where they are asked to create a resume. The class as a whole visits the career services center. They are shown resumes of both freshmen STEM and senior STEM students. There is often concern on the part of the students that they have nothing to write about yet. The key lesson here is to have students create a skeleton of a resume and then start to think about what they will need to do in order to fill the resume in.
While this activity is occurring, the class focus shifts to careers that are possible with a STEM degree. One simple activity is to ask students what a list of famous or somewhat infamous people have in common. One example we use is to ask: What do James Comey (Former FBI), Marie Curie (Pioneer in the field of radioactivity), Mae Jemison (Astronaut), Arthur Nobel (originator of the Nobel Peace prize), Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany), Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and Kurt Vonnegut & Hal Clement (Authors) all have in common? They’ve all studied chemistry and chemical engineering.
The class uses Blackboard extensively. The COR courses all share a common module with content provided for the students including the equivalent of an open resource based textbook. In blackboard, many additional resources were developed. These resources are in the process of being shared with the entire campus. The biographies and images of each of the people used in the above example of chemists and chemical engineers are placed in one module. The class is given an assignment to review the module and document their impressions in a journal. Students typically use either a Google doc or some software/app such as Penzu. Grades for these journals are based on effort instead of rubric.
Following on this theme of careers the class uses both guest speakers and video presentations to explore new ideas about what is possible with a STEM degree. Students are assigned Ted Talks to watch. Local community members are invited to speak to the class about their work. Alumni are included in this group. Occasionally Skype is used to bring remote speakers to the classroom. The campus also uses an Executive in Residence model that can come to speak to these students. An ongoing goal is to create a brief video of the speakers and to centrally locate these resources. Options are currently being explored to locate a central online resource that does not use Blackboard given the current restriction of needing to have permissions to access the content.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grants DUE - 0934777, DUE - 1115203, DUE - 1540746, DUE - 1341207, DUE - 1747527.