Meet the team
Ricky Castles (PI) and Chris Venters, East Carolina University; Charles Goodman, Pitt Community College; Jason Perry, Lenoir Community College; and Hans Chapman, Cape Fear Community College.
In 2019 in response to a call from the National Science Foundation for proposals for the Scholarships in STEM (NSF S-STEM) program, a team of faculty from ECU and three partnering local community colleges submitted a proposal for a Track 3, Inter-Institutional Consortium grant. This grant built upon previous success ECU’s engineering program had in attracting, retaining, and graduating high-achieving, low-income students in a prior S-STEM project (Expanding Engineering in Eastern North Carolina). Recognizing that many of ECU’s students start their undergraduate studies at community colleges, the team was focused on broadening access to scholarships and co-curricular support for both students who start as first-year students at ECU and students who start at one of three local community colleges. The community college partners were selected based upon their geographic proximity to ECU and their offering of an Associate’s in Engineering degree program.
The team originally set out to recruit two scholar cohorts. Each cohort was to be comprised of 20 first-year students in ECU’s Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering program, 10 first-year students in Pitt Community College’s Associate’s in Engineering program, and five first-year engineering students each at Lenoir Community College and Wayne Community College. The grant was funded with a start date of January 1, 2020. The project timeline included intentional recruitment of scholars from a multi-county radius in eastern NC within an approximately one-hour drive from the ECU campus with the first scholars scheduled to enroll in Fall 2020. As may be expected, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered some recruitment plans, but the team was successful in drawing 11 scholars to ECU for the first cohort and three scholars to Wayne Community College. The grant now funds scholarships for students across three cohorts from second- to fourth-year students. The first two graduates from the S-STEM program completed their BS in Engineering in the fall 2023 semester, and nine scholars total have completed the Associate’s in Engineering degree during the project period. The project currently supports 56 active scholars on track to complete engineering degrees and has over the course of the grant period supported 81 unique scholars.
Co-curricular support
PIRATES stands for Providing Inclusive Residential And Transfer Engineering Support. In addition to scholarship support, the PIRATES project intends to provide more holistic academic and social support for students. Students at ECU are encouraged to live on campus in an Engineering Living-Learning Community. All-day Saturday design challenges have been planned each semester to bring scholars together from all participating campuses to work on design projects ranging from designing an incubator to making yogurt to developing a simulated city circuit designed to withstand rainwater and flooding. Each Saturday event includes career speakers from industrial partners. Students at ECU have been invited to attend a summer bridge program allowing them to move into the dorms a week before other students, get mentoring from faculty, learn where all of their classes are, tour local industrial sites to be inspired by the opportunities engineering degrees open for graduates, and learn about various campus resources. The grant also funds a textbook lending library to allow students to borrow textbooks for a semester at no cost in order to defray the cost of attendance. The PI meets with each cohort every week to showcase upcoming opportunities on campus, including career fairs, special events, and speakers and to provide guidance on things like course registration, public speaking, and financial management. The scholars also are invited to engage in service projects including scoring MathCounts papers, helping recruit new students at open house events, and serving as tutors or learning assistants for various courses.
Lessons learned from the PIRATES team
- One of the biggest lessons learned is that collaboration is key. Each of the community colleges in this partnership serves a different county with different needs. Some are more rural with smaller populations, and some have small cities at the center. Within NC, even though the community college system is united in standardizing course numbers, the available course offerings are not consistent in all places. Lenoir Community College, for instance, no longer offers calculus-based physics because of small enrollments in previous semesters. Collaboration with all stakeholders has been critical to the success of the project including building relationships with the financial aid and scholarship directors and academic advisors on each campus to support the students. In addition to faculty, the PI has worked with marketing and outreach and recruiting personnel to advertise the program, department administrators to ensure facilities were available to host events, grants offices to coordinate invoicing and spending of the funds, and industrial partners from across the region to provide a broad set of experiences for students.
- Faculty and staff turnover has been a challenge. Each of the community college partners has had at least one significant personnel change during the project. In some cases, colleges have stopped offering the Associate’s in Engineering program altogether due to challenges in hiring academic staff. This turnover has resulted in the subaward for Wayne Community College being moved to Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, NC. Despite Wilmington being geographically further away, it being a larger population center enables more students to be eligible for the scholarships and more of the Associate’s in Engineering required courses to be offered each semester.
- Keeping students engaged during the pandemic was critical to student retention. The first cohort of students moved into the dorms as first-year students in Fall 2020, and because of the ongoing pandemic, most of them moved back home just two weeks later. While many students disengaged with the university and colleges during that time, the PIRATES team maintained online meetings and activities including game nights in order to maintain social engagement and ensure academic support.
- The textbook lending library has been a popular addition to the department with over 98 books checked out last academic year, helping students save thousands of dollars in academic expenses.
- Hands-on activities and a career focus motivate students to go beyond what they learn in the classroom. The students in the program enjoy the hands-on design challenges, including 3D printing custom rocket nose cones and building sumo robots, while also engaging with professionals in the field through a speaker series.
Next steps
The PIRATES program has been a testbed for what a scholarship program supporting both community college and university students in NC may look like. The PI team is exploring ways to expand on some current initiatives including building more onto the summer bridge program to help students get more on track with the required mathematics prerequisites for entry and to provide supplemental instruction to assist students with completing calculus-based coursework. Castles currently leads NC Engineering Pathways, a statewide group of university and community colleges looking at best practices in supporting students with a particular emphasis on identifying solutions that can work in a variety of contexts such as the major metro areas and the more rural parts of the state.
The PI team has presented their work at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference several times and has plans to do some focus group studies and survey data analysis to determine the utility of the various co-curricular supports offered by the program and to identify areas of improvement.
The PI team is also working with university advancement to solicit funding to support some of the initiatives established by this project, so it may be sustained into the future.