The College of William & Mary has received a five-year, $1.5 million grant from Howard Hughes Medical Institute to change the university’s approach to educating undergraduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The grant is part of HHMI’s 2014 Sustaining Excellence competition, which considered proposals from 170 U.S. universities before awarding $60 million across 37. The grant money will fund “new, evidence-based strategies” to improve STEM education and encourage students to remain in those programs throughout their time as undergraduates, according to a news release from the college.
“Our partnership with HHMI will address the critical challenge of increasing student commitment to STEM disciplines,” William & Mary President Taylor Reveley said in the release. “We will focus especially on underrepresented students to ensure that they not only complete STEM degrees, but do so with strong academic credentials and post-graduate outcomes.”
The grant will combine with existing resources at William & Mary to establish the Wren Scholars Program, which will focus on attracting, engaging and mentoring incoming students from underrepresented backgrounds who are considering STEM majors. There will be about 40 Wren scholars per year in the program, which university officials hope will build a strong cohort of the students.
The students in the program will participate in four initiatives: the pre-freshman summer transition to get ready for introductory science courses, the research-based freshman lab course to become immersed in the process and culture of science, the summer research fellowship for rising sophomores to work with faculty on research and share their findings and the summer chemistry scholarship, which allows the students to study chemistry during the summer following their freshman year.
Margareta Saha, William & Mary’s chancellor professor of biology and the director of the HHMI program at William & Mary, said she was “overjoyed” at the news of the grant, noting previous HHMI support totals $7.2 million and has had “a profound, positive impact on undergraduate science education.”
“Through our partnership with HHMI we have become more keenly aware of the need to increase persistence in STEM fields for students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences, including first-generation college students and students of color,” she said.
Of students who start college in STEM majors, 60 percent do not complete a STEM degree. Among ethnic groups underrepresented in math and science, that number jumps to 80 percent, according to national statistics cited in the release.
“Pursuing STEM majors at the college level can be extremely challenging for all students regardless of background, but this is particularly true for students who are providing their own financial support, have faced unusual adversity, or are coming from high schools that do not have strong science programs,” Saha said in the release. “We want to level the playing field and ensure that each and every student who wants to pursue a science or math major succeeds in his or her goal.”
