Improved STEM Education for 21st Century Environmental Scientists through Stratified Mentoring and Professional Networking at a Hispanic Serving Institution

Funded by NSF-IUSE program, we designed an innovative and interdisciplinary stratified mentoring approach aimed at recruiting, mentoring, and retaining of Hispanic students in the Environmental Sciences Program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Multiple faculty from UTEP, and professionals from federal, state and local agencies, industry, private sectors, and academia are collectively and collaboratively mentoring senior undergraduates through interdisciplinary, hands-on research projects, and in turn, these seniors are supervising sophomore undergraduate students. Thus the team is vertically stratified, with individuals with different levels of expertise, and horizontally stratified, with individuals from multiple disciplines.

Building on curriculum changes made at the lower division and filling critical gaps that are present in the degree sequence, we implemented this interdisciplinary stratified mentoring approach by exposing senior students to a summer internship, one fall semester of cutting-edge research skills and technology in "Regional Water Sustainability" and a spring semester of capstone research experience in "Senior Project".

Various methods were used to assess how the program activities are impacting student participants, including pre- and post-surveys, and a revised version of the Undergraduate Student Self-Assessment (URSSA). The evaluation showed improvements in students' confidence in specific technical skills, and professional and soft skills, students' awareness of and interests in solving environmental issues that are locally, regionally and globally important, and students' self-identity as an environmental scientist and attitudes towards STEM careers. We will discuss motivation, design, implementation, and lessons learned from these curricular changes.