The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs in many disciplines all over the country. These are a very effective way for undergraduate students to participate in research. At NAU we have (I believe) the longest running NSF REU program in astronomy in the country. We have been running this program since 1991, which I believe was the first year that REU programs existed. The success of this long-standing program is due in very large part to Professor Emerita Kathy Eastwood, who ran this program with dedication, enthusiasm, and a lot of hard work until 2016, when I took over as the Site Director (person who runs the program). The other critical piece is a long series of very dedicated and excellent mentors, from NAU and also from Lowell Observatory and USGS. In August I submitted our renewal proposal, asking NSF to fund the next five years of our program. In writing that proposal, I worked with Kathleen Stigmon (our Program Coordinator) to learn about our historical performance. I’m happy to share some of those results here. Our most interesting and compelling results can be shown in three plots, shown below. We have 222 alumni of our program since 1991. Kathleen has worked extremely hard to follow these alumni, and we have only lost track of 4 of them. Figure 1 shows the highest degrees earned, to date, by the 218 alumni whom we are currently tracking. Some 60% have earned advanced degrees, and this doesn’t include students from the past ~5 years or so who are still finishing their undergraduate degrees, or who are in grad school but have not yet completed their advanced degrees. Figure 2 shows the kinds of jobs that our alumni are working in. An amazing 86% of our alumni are working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). These are jobs in academia and in industry. Most of our non-STEM alumni are working in finance, banking, and so on. Finally, Figure 3 shows the female fraction in all of the employment categories shown in Figure 2 and, as the far right point, in our program overall. I am very proud of the fact that the overall female fraction in our program is around 57% -- a high value compared to physics and astronomy programs around the country. I am even more proud of the fact that the female fraction across the various employment categories is not statistically different than for the program overall. Among our alumni, the female fraction is roughly the same for every job category. In other words, our alumnae are not experiencing the “leaky pipeline” – the phenomenon of women preferentially being lost from academic or research or industry jobs at higher professional levels.
I will not claim that we have solved the leaky pipeline dilemma globally. I’m not even sure that we can take credit for the successes of our alumnae. There is no doubt that we have been able to recruit terrific female students to our program, and that they would have succeeded regardless of their next steps, and regardless of their participation in our program. On the other hand, it is clear that the professional outcomes for women in our REU program are remarkably good and remarkably different (better) from that of undergraduate women overall in physics and astronomy. A lot of this success can, I think, be attributed to Kathy Eastwood’s leadership and our mentors’ excellent work over many, many years. In our renewal proposal we described several strategies to increase minority participation in our REU program. We have certainly had many students from minority backgrounds, but only sporadically; we think that with concerted recruiting and mentoring efforts we can offer excellent research opportunities to a large number of students from minority backgrounds. Ideally, the future outcomes for these minority students will include helping them find STEM career success.
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About the Author(S)The contributors to this blog are the students, faculty, and other researchers in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Northern Arizona University. If you have any suggestions, or would like to contribute to this blog, please email mark.salvatore@nau.edu for more information. Archives
January 2019
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