Sarah Mangelsdorf - US grants

The Wisconsin Alliance for Minority Participation (WiscAMP) represents 17-bachelor degree?]granting and 17 two?]year campuses located throughout the State of Wisconsin. The overall goal for WiscAMP is to double the number of underrepresented minority students (URM) who graduate with bachelor degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The overall goals for this alliance are as follows
1) To establish comprehensive programs that support and sustain URM students in STEM disciplines at each of the institutions in the alliance.
2) To develop partnerships between two and four year institutions that allows students to move seamlessly from one institution to another.
3) Increase the faculty and staff understanding of the barriers keeping URM students from staying in or moving through STEM majors.
4) To increase the overall rate of retention of URM students in STEM disciplines, especially between the freshman and sophomore years.
5) Decrease the amount of time to graduation for URM students in STEM.

This alliance will pursue the following four objectives:
1. Extend, expand, and maintain activities that support students throughout their STEM education. This alliance intends to develop comprehensive programs that support students upon entry into the institution and throughout their STEM education.
2. Extend, expand, and maintain partnerships between two and four?]year campuses that foster connections for URM students in STEM disciplines. Based on prior results the WiscAMP will build upon and expand collaborations that assist in the transfer of students from one institution to another.
3. Strengthen alliance?]wide activities that create and sustain relationships within and between institutions. The partner institutions are proposing to build stronger relationships by reinforcing and expanding alliance?]wide activities.
4. Continue to collect data that informs and guides programmatic efforts. Collecting, analyzing, and presenting data about our alliance is in itself transformative therefore this alliance will continue to collect aggregate data for the improvement of the evaluation process.

Intellectual Merit. WiscAMP spent the first 4 years forging partnerships and establishing processes for communication and collaboration across geographically dispersed and mission?]driven organizations. Based on prior results the Mid-level WiscAMP is proposes to support, strengthen and expand evidence?]based practices known to reduce the rate of attrition and time to graduation. A major priority for this Mid-level phase is reducing the rate of attrition between freshman and sophomore year and increasing the number of URM graduates progressing toward the professoriate.

Broader Impacts. WiscAMP will support both education of individual URM students and innovative programs at alliance schools to meet its goals. The short-term outcome will be an increase in the racial/ethnic diversity of students graduating with degrees in STEM majors from WiscAMP partner schools. The long-term outcome will be greater ethnic and racial diversity among academic and government leaders in STEM. WiscAMP could serve as model for other states in increasing the number of URM STEM graduates.

The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program assists universities and colleges in diversifying the STEM workforce through the development of highly competitive students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM disciplines: African-Americans, Alaska Natives, American Indians, Hispanic Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders. The goal of the LSAMP Bridge to the Doctorate (BD) Activity is to increase the quantity and quality of STEM graduate students from underrepresented populations, with emphasis on Ph.D. matriculation and completion. BD programs implemented in the nation's institutions of higher education contribute to addressing one of the objectives in NSF's 2014-2018 Strategic Plan, namely to "integrate education and research to support development of a diverse STEM workforce with cutting-edge capabilities." Since national security and economic vitality of the United States require a highly trained domestic STEM workforce, institutions engaged in the most advanced levels of research and innovation must do their part to train tomorrow's leaders in STEM. The Wisconsin LSAMP BD (WiscAMP-BD) Program builds on the growing diversity of undergraduate students who are completing their Baccalaureate degrees in STEM. The strategies employed by the WiscAMP-BD Program will contribute significantly to increasing the diversity of leaders in academia and the STEM workforce, thereby helping the nation to remain globally competitive.

The WiscAMP-BD program is based on established theories of identity development and integration, adult learning and career development, and institutional change and has the following objectives:
1) To recruit and enroll a cohort of twelve students into any of the 54 STEM doctoral programs at UW-Madison;
2) To pair each of the students who are strong candidates for graduate study and are underrepresented in STEM with faculty mentors who are engaged in cutting-edge research and committed to mentoring students from underrepresented populations;
3) To establish a community of practice for WiscAMP-BD students to support the development of eight core competencies and their persistence to the doctoral degree.