Our students have worked on Coral Health and Disease as well as Coral Restoration projects. They've also worked on Florida Red Tide mitigation, sea turtle strandings investigations and ocean acidification projects. As far as recruiting goes, we recruit from two local community colleges largely through word of mouth. We also attend the LSAMP B2B meetings at one school and speak in classes at the other. Faculty, staff and previous inters are mostly how we get the word out.

Hi Jasmin and team! MarSci-LACE is doing such wonderful, and important work. Thank you. I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the culture shift with internships. Were ally workshops the main way you got your mentors and other senior staff onboard with this culture change? Were there more facility-wide efforts, too (e.g., requiring paid internships, etc.) 

Hi Emily, It was a multi-faceted approach. It started with formal Mentor Development Workshops based off of the Entering Mentoring program. In this we addressed the importance of mentorship and introduced the idea of how mentoring practices need to be fluid to fit the needs of the particular mentee. We also talked about how internships were at their core about mentorship and the focus should be on what the student needs. This helped us address a lot of the issues of bias in selection. We moved trained our staff to evaluate applications on an impact factor that took into account access to opportunities and mitigated the catch-22 that often comes with these programs where people who have already had experiences get selected because they are "easier to mentor." Following the formal training mentors actually requested continued conversation so we started having weekly Mentor Alliance meetings that were informal discussions for mentors to talk to eachother, share resources, challenges and success. They have continued to get more and more popular as word of mouth spreads. MarSci-LACE lit the match but the mentors themselves fanned the flame with mentors with buy-in into the program saw that it worked and shared with others. In addition to that we implemented mentor-intern compacts (developed as a collaboration between interns and mentors in week 1) and formal check-ins with the MarSci-LACE team to hold mentors and interns accountable for them BOTH holding up their ends of the agreement this created a balance and was a constant reminder that mentorship is a two way street and that mentors are equally responsible for the success of an internship. Then when Mote was primed and open to have those discussions, we started holding the ally skills workshops to move from okay we see that people are different and all worth mentoring to now let's actively be anti-racist. Laying the ground work made those conversations the logical next step and they were met with little resistance. So that's the broad overview. It also looked like me calling mentors up and asking for them to explain to me why something wasn't working or why they didn't think a certain applicant was a "good fit." I have a really well established relationship with all our mentors to the point where I can call them up and say, "hey you're not acting as an ally right now" or "have you thought about how your intern might feel about this" etc. It's about creating dialogue and giving people the tools and support they need to grow. We found that when we did that and gave our mentors room to grow they did and they changed the culture on their own.

Thank you for the great response. This is SO helpful- and your team has done so much work. Many institutions (like mine, as a non profit) are still at a place where we are still trying to figure out how to compensate interns for their labor. Changing culture is so important, and it's nice to have a model that works with MarSci-LACE.

One thing that worked with Mote is we shifted to offering part-time as well as full-time with the MarSci-LACE program because fulltime intensive research programs just don't work for a lot of students who have to work, are caretakers or take courses year-round etc. It also has a duel effect of cutting down the cost per intern. Our part-time interns work 120 hours total in the semester and set their schedule with their mentors. This model works great for some of our students but also would be great for an organization with a tight budget (we are also a non-profit, so I get that). With $4,000 you can fund 2 interns instead of one, for example. That would be my advice of a good starting place. Stipends are make or break for whether a student can do an internship for sure, but there is also an opportunity cost that is often ignored with the fulltime experiences. Even if an org pays a student, you have to remember that if someone walks away from a job for a summer it may not be there when they come back so not only are they loosing that income from the summer but also beyond. It's an important thing that we found that makes a difference. No matter how high our stipend was there were some people that just couldn't do fulltime. So maybe think about if there are part-time opportunities that could be developed at your internship. I hope that's helpful.

Hi Troy,

As part of our background research on the current state of minority marine scientist recruitment and retention today we interviewed 50 minorities who either were currently working in the field of marine science or were at some point to understand what has helped them succeed or ultimately led to them leaving the field. We also do pre- and post- assessments of our mentors before and after the ally skills workshops and mentor development workshop to measure their change in confidence, competency and attitude. Similarly, we assess our interns before and after their internship to measure changes in science identity, sense of belonging and self-efficacy. We also do exit interviews with them to dive deeper into their experiences in the program, assets/experiences they brought to the internship that were helpful and what aspects of the program they found most impactful. We also collect information on how their work/life balance during the internship was and any challenges they may have faced during the internship period whether they occurred in or outside of the lab. Our mentors do a group debrief at the end of each internship cycle where we get feedback on how they used mentor tools and strategies in their mentoring process that semester, what worked and what didn't and any adjustments or modifications they made. We collect a lot of data and use it as both formative and summative evaluation of the program and make modifications and adjustments based on new information. Each semester we have to tweak less and less, so we are hoping we are nearing our "sweet spot" in terms of finding the best model. The cohort coming in in the fall will be our first cohort with interns participating at other institutions so this next years data will be focused on comparing all the data collected from Mote and our partner institutions to see how well the model transfers. With this information hopefully we'll be able to see how staff and interns are impacted at other institutions and continue to make adjustments to generalize the model in a way that maximizes both transferability and effectiveness.

Hello Jay, thank you for reaching out. I will send you an email later this week. In regards to your second question, yes. After our pilot study with our 2 independent marine institutions we will be working to expand out to marine labs of academic institutions, starting with those in Florida. 

Hi Judith, we had 3 interns extend their internships another semester. One of those interns actually ended up changing their major from Computer Science to biotechnology because they loved the work so much they changed their career path. This same intern was hired for a position in the same lab they interned in. One intern is transferring to the University of Hawaii. In total, 8 interns are still engaging in marine science in some way. 

P.S. Thanks for your kind words regarding MISS

I mentioned this briefly in a reply above, but we implemented Mentor Development Workshops, Ally Skills Workshops and monthly Mentor Alliance meetings for informal discussion on mentorship. We also have many interns outside of the MarSci-LACE program (Mote hosts 200 interns on average) and many of the tools that are shown to be effective with our MarSci-LACE cohort have been applied and integrated into other programs. We also have used similar recruitment techniques for our other internship programs.

Hi Laura,

In our flyer we say to qualify you must be a student at one of the 2 community colleges, identify as an underrepresented minority as identified by NSF and that you must be a US citizen or permanent resident. Occasionally we have people apply that don't meet one or more of the criteria and we simply direct them towards our other internship programs we offer here at Mote. We also started adding no marine science or laboratory experience necessary, swimming not required and all majors welcome to our flyer so that more students feel like it's "for them" after getting feedback from faculty/staff that some students expressed hesitation about having no background, not being able to swim etc. We recently changed our application so that instead of picking a program we ask them a series of questions about their interests and ideal work environments because we received feedback that picking a research program/project from a list when they had little to know prior experience was a bit daunting. In short answer to your question we do a lot of feedback surveys with students that come to our recruitment events and students that do the program and are in constant contact with our faculty/staff that work hard recruiting students to keep our ears on the ground about how best to serve our students. Our recruitment is extremely personalized, we go to the schools and in the virtual world host Zoom Q&A sessions but we have buy-in from faculty/staff who recruit on a personal level as well. The fact of the matter is a person that doesn't know what an internship is, what marine science is, how to apply to internships etc. they are going to walk right by a flyer or delete an email. You have to lay a foundation, build trust and create strong communication of what the internship opportunity is. Hope that answers your question.

Wow, these are some great strategies. Thank you so much for sharing!