Student Impressions of Elements of a S-STEM Program

A state university received an NSF S-STEM grant to provide scholarship funds and enhanced programmatic activities for engineering and computer science students. Some of the enhanced activities available to the scholarship recipients are faculty mentoring, meetings of the cohort students, the ability to attend professional workshops and participate in STEM outreach activities, and the opportunity to attend a Emerging Researchers National (ERN) conference in Washington, D.C. Some of these activities are similar to what other schools have in their S-STEM programs. While the effectiveness of the different program activities are often studied at institutions, it is often less clear how students view the usefulness of various program activities. In this paper, we will describe in more detail the scholarship program at XXX and provide explanations of the different programmatic activities available to the students in the program. We will then provide the results of a survey of the students in the program, where they were asked to provide their impressions of the program activities. The results of the survey can be beneficial to other schools developing S-STEM programs, as it sheds light on how receptive students may be to possible common program elements. The paper will also contain some discussion on the importance of the group activities in a virtual environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we will provide some suggestions based on our experiences on how to improve the program activities to make them more beneficial to the students.