Board 189: A Mentor’s Reflection on Challenges of Practice in a Scholarship Program for Lower-Income Computing Students

Abstract This paper describes an NSF S-STEM-funded scholarship program, representing a collaborative five-year grant project among three prominent universities in the Southeast region of the United States. Its primary objective is to support dedicated scholars in graduating and finding a professional pathway. Each institution recruited a cohort of 15-20 scholars annually for three years. The project offers scholarships and provides curricular and co-curricular support to academically talented but financially challenged students in the computing disciplines, including Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, and Information Technology majors, starting from their junior years. The program aims to impact 150 scholars, most of whom are underrepresented in computing. Scholars receive support throughout their graduation and beyond should they pursue graduate studies in a STEM discipline at any of the three participating institutions. While the previous section highlights the basic program structure and how the program is intended to work, there are more subtleties and challenges to achieving these programmatic objectives. We think that more institutional programs should include reflections by those who carry out the program to help reveal the nuances, challenges, lessons learned, and strategies associated with the practice. In other work, we have documented student impacts through surveys, interviews, and observations redacted. In this paper, we highlight the reflections of a key personnel practitioner to reveal the challenges that emerge once the plans are being carried out. While the paper is not organized by a formal research question, the lead author's reflections were organized to answer a question of practice. The overarching question being answered in the following reflections is: How can mentorship be executed effectively, in light of various constraints? We investigate challenges of time and quality individual mentorship at scale. Our reflections can help other similar programmatic efforts think strategically and collaboratively about how to solve collective problems.