Prospective Graduate Diversity Day Successful

This summer, more than 140 undergraduate students from underrepresented groups visited Tufts campus to learn more about advanced degrees from Tufts' professional schools, as well as programs in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. This conference provided a window into higher education possibilities for students who, traditionally, make up a small percentage of the graduate student population in the United States.

Yvette Dalton-McCoy, associate director of Graduate Diversity Programs, organized the prospective student day in conjunction with the Provost Office's Graduate and Professional Student Admissions Recruitment Committee, or GAPSARC.

Associate Provost Vincent Manno shakes hands with Andre Whittington, a Leadership Alliance Scholar from Brown University.

The goal was to help raise students' awareness of Tufts as a place to come to graduate school, and one way of doing this was to outreach to various "pipeline" programs," says Dalton-McCoy.

Attendees of the Graduate Diversity Day came from universities as far away as Hawaii and as close as Boston, and all participate in what are referred to as "pipeline" programs—national programs, such as the Leadership Alliance, that seek to engage member schools, such as Tufts University, in preparing underrepresented students for graduate education and creating a diverse community of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Erica Nwankwo, a senior at Morgan State University, is a Leadership Alliance Scholar who conducted research with Valencia Joyner, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. Nwankwo attended the graduate recruitment day and says it gave her some additional insight into her desire to pursue a doctoral degree in engineering. "I want to be among the new generation of engineers, scientists and researchers that will develop, design, and manufacture biomedical equipment and gene therapies that will advance the health of mankind," she says.

And the need for this "new generation" is dire, especially in the science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields, says Travis Brown, program manager for Tufts' Center for STEM Diversity. "The U.S. has a shortage of domestically educated and trained STEM field employees," says Brown, who helped lead tours of the Medford campus during students' July visit.

In 2006-2007, the majority of the U.S. students receiving doctoral degrees in the STEM fields were white; Asian students trailed far behind at just more than 6%, and Hispanic and black students at less than 3% of the Ph.D. population. The percentages for master’s degrees in the same time period are slightly higher with more than 7% black students in the graduate population, and nearly 5% and 9% for Hispanic and Asian students respectively. Across the board, American Indian and Alaskan Native populations comprise less than 1% of graduate degrees conferred.

"Right now, students are moving away from STEM fields as early as middle school, as soon as it no longer becomes cool to be smart," says Brown. "For the few that persist through high school and into college, we want to make sure they have the resources and support—academic as well as social—that they need to continue as far with the sciences as they want to go. It's about building a pipeline, and making sure the pipeline is not a leaky one."

The "Inner Workings"
Prospective students who participated in the Graduate Diversity Day arrived on campus the night before for a reception with directors from New England universities with Ronald E. McNair Scholars programs. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the McNair scholars program—named for Ronald McNair, an African-American astronaut who died during the Challenger Disaster—is another pipeline program for students from underrepresented groups who have strong academic potential.

Tufts is a member of the Leadership Alliance and hosts summer research students on both the Medford and Boston campuses. Though Tufts currently doesn't have a McNair scholars program, many institutions nearby do. "In the Midwest, you might need to go 400 miles to find the next McNair or Leadership Alliance site, but in New England, the densities of these sites is much higher," says Vincent Manno, Associate Provost and chair of GAPSARC. "This confluence of programs made the prospective student day particularly unique," Manno says.

Students began the next day hearing insights from Provost Jamshed Bharucha, Lisa Coleman, Executive Director of Tufts' Office of Institutional Diversity, Dalton-McCoy and Manno. Students could then explore Tufts' three campuses to find out more about graduate education at Tufts.

At the Boston campus, students interested in health science and nutrition professional degrees could take two different tours to be able to gain information about several programs in one visit.

"Prospective students could say 'I might be interested in dental school' or 'I might want to pursue a Ph.D. at the Sackler School' and would be able to see both schools," says Manno.

Manno says he received positive feedback from students who took the tour of Tufts Medical School and who were able to talk with second and third-year medical students.

One of the difficult things for students about applying to medical school is literally getting inside a medical school to see what it's all about," Manno says. "Students might be volunteers in hospital, but you only get to see what's going on one floor or one department. You don't get a sense of 'What is medical education?'"

The day ended with an ice cream social where graduate students and diversity leaders alike were able to reconvene in "less of a structured interaction," says Manno. "Hopefully, if the students have had a really good experience at Tufts, even if a particular student doesn't come to Tufts for graduate work—he or she will go and tell friends about us back at Morehouse or Brown or wherever they go to school."

Next steps
Moving forward, members of GAPSARC will go on excursions and visit neighboring universities with pipeline programs to continue outreach efforts. Dalton-McCoy says she intends to hold the prospective graduate diversity day conference at Tufts in 2011 and hopes to make the conference a biennial tradition. "We hope to begin to see an uptick in applications and enrollment of underrepresented students during that intervening year," she says.

One of the hurdles that lies ahead in creating a diverse graduate student population is "finding support for summer research students in arts, humanities and social sciences, fields which often don't have substantial outside funding," says Manno adding that the Leadership Alliance pipeline program has a tendency to focus more on the sciences. Manno says that Tufts has made the commitment to support at least four Leadership Alliance students in these non-STEM areas in the summer of 2010.

Of course, Tufts will still continue to support its students in engineering and the sciences as well. As an undergraduate, Professor Joyner participated in MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program in which she worked in a lab with a faculty mentor and graduate students. Joyner says the experience given to students like herself or her Leadership Alliance advisee, Erica Nwankwo, is invaluable. "Such programs give students the opportunity to find out what sub-discipline they might be interested in, learn more about graduate research, and to engage in interdisciplinary team work that will be useful throughout their careers," Joyner says.

—Julia C. Keller is Communications Manager at Tufts School of Engineering
[This story first appeared on the School of Engineering website, Oct. 29, 2009]