NSF Awards: 1922351
MarSci-LACE is led by the independent, nonprofit Mote Marine Laboratory and was founded in 2019 through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to Mote, the only non-academic institution to receive an LSAMP Center of Excellence award. It is with co-funded by the NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) initiative. We are focused on researching and understanding best practices to recruit, support and retain underrepresented minority students in marine science.
Patricia Marsteller
Professor of Practice Emeritus
Thanks for creating this and for giving student's voice. I would love to know more about the types of projects and how you recruited students. I'd also love to know more about how you are or plan to evaluate the impact on career choices and pathways.
Meghan Marrero
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Lisa Tossey
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
Hello all! We are in our second year here at MarSci-LACE. All of our MarSci-LACE cohorts thus far have done their internships in a pandemic. We've had interns ranging in age from 20 to 45. We've had folks from all ages and backgrounds. We've learned a lot in the last 2 years and we are excited to share with you. We also have conducted a series of ally skills workshops and mentor development workshops with our staff and are completely shifting the culture around internships here at Mote. I'll be around to answer any questions you have about recruiting, supporting and retaining minority students in STEM.
Meghan Marrero
Emily Yam
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.)
Meghan Marrero
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Meghan Marrero
Emily Yam
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.
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Meghan Marrero
Joan Freese
Emily Yam
Maya Trotz
Am thrilled to see this work happening at MOTE. Excellent.
Jasmin Graham
Lance Bush
The testimonials from your students are so uplifting. This is great work you are doing, and so necessary as we need more impassioned work on marine issues, and a diverse range of approaches. Do you have thoughts about how you can scale this - and I know that is difficult, but would be great to provide more opportunities.
Gina Greenidge
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
Yes actually, years 3 and 4 will focus on how to scale this. This year we are doing a bit of a pilot with our partner marine research institutions, Perry Institute of Marine Science and the Smithsonian Marine Station. We have a MarSci-LACE intern doing an internship in the Bahamas with Perry and 2 interns doing a virtual internship (due to COVID) with Smithsonian. We are going to see if our approach can be applied to other independent marine institutions. If that all works out those institutions will start adapting our model with all their interns. We are starting with other independent marine institutions due to their flexibility and quicker reactivity to policy changes, but ideally this model could be adjusted to work at traditional academic institutions as well. We've got the model working well at Mote, next step is to see how it does with Perry and Smithsonian over the next couple of years. We will be sharing out the results of our tests to transfer and scale the MarSci-LACE model at the conference we have planned at the end of our grant period. Eager to see how it all shakes out and hopefully we can expand to a broader range of marine science institutions if renewed for another grant period.
Joan Freese
I am a fan of MOTE and happy to know about this work. Thank you for sharing!
Jasmin Graham
Meghan Marrero
It is refreshing to hear that your focus is on both recruitment and support for these scientists at various interest/career stages. This work is critical to ensure that we hear from diverse voices. Like you, we have found that offering part-time internships can be helpful and also allow interns to retain other employment on which they may rely beyond the internship time period.
Jasmin Graham
Deb Cole
Hi Jasmin and Fellow Louis Stokes Center of Excellence!
My name is Deb Cole and I'm the program manager for the Louis Stokes Midwest Regional Center of Excellence. I think we may have connected via email within the past year.
What a wonderful video that highlights the important work of MarSci-LACE and the impact on students who participate in the internships. I hope we can stay connected so that I can disseminate the internship opportunities to our LSAMP community.
Great work! Congratulations!
Deb
Jasmin Graham
Troy Sadler
I'm excited to see this work on marine science education. This is an area that has so much potential in terms of generating excitement about STEM and positive attitudes and ideas about STEM. I'd be interested in learning more about any research that your team might be doing in terms of how the program is working, what elements are most important, etc.
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Troy Sadler
Kristin Grimes
Hi Jasmin! What a great program! It would be neat to see if there are ways our programs could connect and support one another - I'm the PI for the SEAS Islands Alliance. You can learn more about our program by watching our video here: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentati...
Patricia Marsteller
Professor of Practice Emeritus
Thanks Jasmine for your eloquent answers, especially about mentor training and culture change. I so agree that we can make those transforms happen. At my institution we have a mentor training series for faculty and other ones for GS and PD. (I like education better than training). The impact has been really great as people become more culturally aware. We added a piece this year on co-creating DEI statement for the lab with trainees! It is cool to see!
Jasmin Graham
Jay Labov
Senior Advisor for Education and Communication (Retired)
As a facilitator for the STEM Video Hall Showcase, we are asked to review 13 or 14 videos and seed the discussion with comments and questions. This video was toward the end of the list I was given. By the time I got here, I noted that there already is very rich comments and responses about this wonderful video, all of which resonates with me. Thank you to the producers of this video for facilitating this conversation!
I had two additional thoughts that I didn't see reflected in previous discussion posts:
- I was a member of an advisory board for a large NSF grant that was awarded to the University of South Florida and Hillsborough Community College, not too far from Mote. That grant also was focused on improving STEM retention, especially for students from populations that historically have been underrepresented in STEM. The grant is now finished, but I'm guessing that there may be opportunities for some collaboration with them in the future. Jasmin: If you want more information, send me an e-mail (jblabov@gmail.com) and I can give you the name of the PI for that grant. Seems like a potentially good way to leverage NSF's money!
- The environmental issues that the video describes are relevant for all of Florida. You indicated that you are working with laboratories in other locations, but do you have any plans to work with other labs in Florida (e.g., Scripps, the Rosenstiel School of Marine Science at the University of Miami) to find ways that underrepresented students can make an even larger contribution to addressing these issues more holistically across different parts of the state?
Thank you again for participating by contributing this very informative video!
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
James Callahan
Thank you for providing such a beautiful video. Of particular interest to us are videos where students and educators in the field speak in their own words and voices of their experiences. Such an important part of diversity and social justice is who speaks and represents programs.
Naturally, a wonderful program in Marine Science, such as yours, draws our interest; as we focus on climate change, sea-level rise and ocean acidification. Science and STEM-based action.
Outstanding work you are doing!
Jasmin Graham
Judith Dilts
Retired Associate Dean, College of Science and Mathematics
Jasmin, I agree with others that the video is great and the program really needed and well-laid out. I know this is a fairly new program, but I wondered what interns are thinking about doing/have done following the internship. What a great opportunity! (And I know this is not relevant to this program, but I found MISS really interesting!)
Judy
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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
Judith Dilts
Marley Jarvis
Hi! Former marine scientist here. :-) Thanks so much for sharing such a beautiful video and great program! I'm curious what kind of institution-level work your program was able to do to help shift the culture to be more inclusive either before or during the program?
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Marley Jarvis
Laura Cisneros
Hi Jasmin et al., This looks like such a fantastic program, and a great video to showcase it. I was wondering if you could speak to how you select students for this amazing opportunity. You spoke a little bit about it above, but are there example questions you have the student answer to help identify students that haven't gotten an opportunity like this? Is there particular phrasing you use in your promotional material or recruitment materials so that the program attracts the students you are hoping to serve? Or are there other approaches you use for recruitment? I'd love to hear about any of strategies you use.
Jasmin Graham
Project Coordinator
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.
Gina Greenidge
Laura Cisneros
Wow, these are some great strategies. Thank you so much for sharing!
Gina Greenidge
Great work Jasmin! I am grateful for hearing the experiences of the students in your program!