Hello April! Pathways to Science/ Caminos a la Ciencia looks like a brand new and very exciting opportunity for freshman and sophomore high school Hispanic girls interested in STEM. I have a few questions as I consider passing the opportunity along. When is the application deadline for this summer? Also, it looks like the motivation is to foster local growth in interest pursuing STEM fields in Virginia specifically. Is that the case or are you taking applications from around the US?

Thank you for sharing this exciting project! Others may also have specific questions not answered on your website FAQ (http://pathwaystoscience.com/faq) or elsewhere. If so, hopefully they will jump right in. ~Sarah

Hi Sarah,

Our project is aimed at the Central Virginia area; we would take applications from other areas of the US but the goal of the project is really bolstering the STEM workforce in our local MSA.  We are still accepting applications, but only for a few more days - we have received many more applications than we have spots for this summer, so our Selection Committee will meet soon to select our awardees.

Thank you April! This is a terrific model for others to emulate elsewhere. It makes sense that you are digging deeply within your region to build a local pipeline. Congratulations on a terrific effort! 

Hi Sarah,

I have been working mostly with guidance counselors in our local area - because of the large Hispanic population in our region, most schools have guidance counselors who work specifically with their school's Hispanic population, targeting those students who have recently arrived in the US, who have developing English skills, and for whom English is not spoken in the home.  Those counselors are the best liaisons to this population and have been working one-on-one with potential applicants to get applications complete and submitted on time.  

Using these strategies we have received many more applications than spots for this summer's program, so we feel that this is an effective recruitment method for our local area. 

April, this sounds like an effective strategy that others would also find useful. Glad to understand better. Thanks!

Hi Breanne,

Our partner organizations are hosting the monthly cohort meetings, which will occur for 2-3 hours once a month during the academic year.   Some of our partners include the Science Museum of Virginia, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, CodeVA (which holds after school and in-school coding classes for youth), and Maymont Park - these partners already offer dynamic engaging programming aimed students in this age group, so they are adapting some of their activities into "exclusive" opportunities especially for Pathways participants.  We are keeping these activities short, free, and during times when parents are likely to be available to bring our Pathways participants to these activities.

Lab activities for this summer include a "Chemistry and Crime" seminar, where participants will learn to lift latent prints, analyze ink from a ransom note, and make a cast of a bite mark,a trip to a local dental school, where there will learn about dentistry and take their own dental impressions, a trip to a local endangered waterway that research students at our college are working to remediate, a trip to find invasive plant species in our local area, and a robotics seminar run by a local robotics engineer.

The footage in the video is footage from Randolph-Macon College research students in the laboratory - at our institution we pride ourselves in engaging undergraduates in original, publishable research projects from the beginning of their college education.  Our endowed Shapiro Undergraduate Research Fellowships allow our students to perform paid, original research with our faculty members - the results of their research have been presented at national and international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.  As our program progresses we will engage our Pathways participants with these researchers to allow them to participate in an original project while still in high school.  

Hi Nancy,

We are actively seeking funding to endow this program so that it can continue indefinitely at our institution.  Our research indicates that we could accommodate 5x the number of students that we have funded through our pilot program this year, which would be approximately 50 students per year.  

Our research also indicates that financial considerations are one of the main barriers to college attendance for this cohort, so an additional goal of the project is identifying funding to increase the amount of scholarship support we are able to provide to our Pathways participants.  We have been working both within our institution and with external funding agencies to identify funding sources for that piece of the program.  

Successfully reaching these funding and sustainability goals will take significant work by our partnership, but we believe that we have assembled a team that is diverse enough to complete the task at hand.  Our team consists of higher education professionals, STEM-focused non-profits, Fortune-500 STEM-focused corporations, the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the Office of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  So we have a lot of support!