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| navigate: home: magazine: fall 2002: article | |
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Research conference brings more than 500 top students to Penn State By Celena E. Kusch | ||||||||||||
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More than 500 top undergraduate students from across the country met on the University Park campus for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) Conference. This is the first time this national conference of students and more than 200 faculty and staff members was held at Penn State.
The Summer Research Opportunities Program is designed to interest talented undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in academic careers and to enhance their preparation for graduate study by exposing them to graduate-level research while they are still in college. The SROP Conference provides a capstone experience for the students.
“One of the great challenges for graduate programs is to reach communities that are underrepresented in graduate schools. These tend to be minority communities or poor communities where most parents did not attend college and none attended graduate school,” said Dr. Evelyn Ellis, director of the Office of Graduate Educational Equity.
“Often, students from these communities have no frame of reference for understanding what graduate school is, what graduate students do or how you get into graduate school,” Ellis explained. “In addition, we have found that students from these communities are not mentored at the undergraduate level to explore a graduate degree. We know that the people who most often go on to graduate school are people with family members or close friends who completed graduate degrees, so mentoring is extremely important if we are to encourage exceptional students from underrepresented communities to continue their education.”
According to Ellis, the 12 member institutions of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, including Penn State, other Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago, launched the Summer Research Opportunities Program 15 years ago to help overcome these challenges.
“The goal is to introduce the concept of graduate school to these students, bring them to campus over the summer, and have them intimately involved with graduate faculty and students,” Ellis said. “This works because the students are all carefully selected to be part of the program. They are already prepared academically, and we just need to teach them the rules of the game. Over the summer, they are saturated in graduate-level research and learn what will be expected of them in graduate school.”
Thus far, the program has been extremely successful. Committee on Institutional Cooperation institutions involved in the Summer Research Opportunities Program have tracked students and found that more than 70 percent of the SROP students at CIC schools go on to graduate school. Those who do not enroll in graduate schools either go on to professional schools or become employed by major corporations.
At Penn State, 149 students participated in Penn State research projects over the past five years. Thirty of those students returned to Penn State for graduate work. Others attended Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of London, University of Hawaii and other top-ranked institutions.
A current study by Penn State’s Office of Graduate Educational Equity has also found that of those Summer Research Opportunities Program alumni who have not enrolled in graduate school many are still considering returning for advanced degrees in the future.
“It’s clear that we are just starting to see the positive impact that this program has on the students,” Ellis said.
According to Ellis, the trend now is for most of the top-tier schools, including the CIC institutions, the Ivy League and many others, to host similar programs.
“SROP is very important to Penn State and the other members of the CIC who want to maintain the momentum of leadership in this area, so we can continue to attract these bright students,” she added.
Ellis also noted that hosting the conference provides an added benefit to the University.
“Given our placement on the map, we rarely have an opportunity to expose 500 highly qualified students of color to our campus and community. The conference allowed us to showcase ourselves to these students, all of whom we want for our graduate programs. We really wanted to impress them with everything Penn State has to offer,” she said.
During the conference, students experienced life on the Penn State campus while they discussed their research projects, heard talks by former participants, met CIC graduate students, learned about graduate admission procedures and financial aid and met important role models from similar communities.
This year, the keynote speaker was Dr. Guion S. Bluford Jr., a Penn State alumnus and the first African American to fly in space in 1983 aboard Space Shuttle Challenger. Bluford was selected in the first class of space shuttle astronauts in 1978 and has served as a NASA mission specialist and payload commander astronaut on four Space Shuttle missions. He has logged more than 688 hours in space.
Bluford is currently vice president of Microgravity R&D and Operations for Logicon Operations and Services, Logicon Inc., an information technology and engineering services company of Northrop Grumman, headquartered in Herndon, Va. He also serves as program manager of the NASA Glenn Research Center, Microgravity Research, Development and Operations Contract, and he is responsible for the design, development, integration and operational support of the NASA Fluids and Combustion Facility and associated space flight experiment hardware for the International Space Station. | |||||||||||
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© 2002 Outreach Communications, Outreach & Cooperative Extension, The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108, fax: (814) 863-2765, e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu |
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