Thanks, Preeti and team, for continuing this important work! I would be interested in knowing a couple of things. 1) How far have you had the opportunity to follow the students into the impact on their decisions about higher education, and if so, what have you found about persistence? I always worry about the transition to higher Ed and the demands of science core curriculum on their success; and 2) Whether you have made some kind of accounting of social capital indicators in a structured way (like a framework) for success over and above your conclusions?

I really appreciated the very clear explanation of this project using diagrams and narration, and the great summary of the research questions. Your consistent use of "bubbles" to represent the data as well as relationships made it easy to follow. I was really intrigued by your explanation of how COVID-19 affected the research, and would be interested to hear if you have any more of your research findings you could share at this point.

I am really impressed by the thoughtful reflection questions on the mentor-intern relationship.  Especially in these times, to ask students to reflect on challenges and WHO HELPED THEM overcome those challenges strikes me as incredibly important.  Thank you!

This is great! High school-aged is such a critical stage to invest in and mentor. Curious if any participants have said that they were also able to get their friends more interested in science? Does the positive impact of mentoring students extend into their bubble of connections or stop with them?

Great video and applies to college too. The question: what more can we be doing to create spaces of belonging in STEM is a great one! 

Thank you for this program. Mentorship has always been a key component of our graduate STEM education, and bringing it in to support students early in their careers is a great idea. Have you thought of expanding into the 2-year schools? I run a CURE with my intro bio students at a community college and find that participating in a larger research project is very motivating for my students.

Congratulations to American Museum of Natural History and SRI International for their  insightful work on  Staying in Science.  I hope that this work encourages others to bring the opportunity to explore exposure to scientific research to underserved high school students across the nation.  Much is said about how the development of scientists from  diverse backgrounds is critical to our nation’s future.  Your program demonstrates how  it could be made possible.  Absent this kind of program at the high school level or earlier, we in higher ed are left to do what we can to add to the cadre of scientists from underserved communities.  Although there are programs at the higher ed level that do a good job of creating qualified minority scientists (e.g. Meyerhoff Scholarship program), and HBCUs that contribute disproportionately, we must do more.  Thanks to programs supported by  NSF HBCU-UP grants, my university (Langston University) has also been able to contribute (lincproject.com).  As mentioned in your Abstract, we found that intense mentoring, a supportive faculty and staff with whom students could identify, and creating experiences that support self-efficacy – along with innovative teaching and learning strategies - were critical elements in our success. Having said that, it would be great to have a program such as yours become mainstream.

Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor. 

Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor. 

 This sounds like a very exciting investigation into what keeps students in STEM (or gets them interested in the first place).  Finding ways to make these communities more inclusive and increase retention is so important.  I hope your final results are as encouraging as your preliminary ones.

Will 2021 be the last year of the study?  Do you think it is important to follow these students through all four years of college, or even after to see what careers they end up pursuing?

I loved the clarity of your video and project, we would love to her more about your results as I am sure they also will be useful for our work, please do take a look at our video, we do mentoring in Chile focussing in this fisrt stage on young women and also see the imposter syndrome is an important factor to tacke, hope you can give us your opinion: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentati...