Engineering and Computing (SPECTRA) program is an NSFScholarship in STEM (S-STEM)(Award # 1834081) based out of Clemson University in SouthCarolina. The SPECTRA program focuses on aiding transfer students interested in anEngineering or Computing degree by offering scholarships, opportunity to form cohorts, andaccess to professional skill-building programs. The goals of SPECTRA are as follows: (1) to provide scholarship opportunities to low-income students who wish to pursue engineering or computing at Clemson (2) to build cohorts of transfer students to support their transition into Clemson while also allowing for the Advisors for Cohorted Engineers (ACE) Fellows program to aid in the
Adegbola Owolabi P.E., Morgan State University Dr. Oludare Owolabi, a professional engineer in Maryland, joined the Morgan State University faculty in 2010. He is the director of the sustainable infrastructure development, smart innovation and resilient engineering lab and the director of undergraduate programs in the department of civil engineering at Morgan State University. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2025 Perception and Adaptation of First-Year International Graduate Students Towards Academic Writing: A Case Study at a School of EngineeringAbstractInternational graduate students (IGS) encounter a few challenges in academic writing during theirfirst semesters in
peer-mentoring, community buildingactivities, cohort meetings, professional development opportunities, mental health and wellnessevents, faculty discussions, and career coaching [12]. The relatively newer Bridge programs,which support students’ transition to graduate school by bridging educational and developmental,have been developed extensively for students studying sciences disciplines such as chemistry andphysics. Many such programs are linked with the Inclusive Graduate Education Network(IGEN), such as the American Chemical Society Bridge Program (ACS-BP), which is an effortto increase the number of chemical science PhDs awarded to underrepresented students (ACS,2024). Themes of self-efficacy, and the related challenges students face with
disciplines limited the breadth of their exposure todivergent ways of thinking at the undergraduate level at the expense of disciplinary depth.Interestingly, many students in our study noted that they were glad their undergraduateexperiences were siloed to facilitate deep disciplinary thinking then, but now that they areinterdisciplinary graduates, their career goals are changing, and the recognize that their previouslearning makes it hard for them to negotiate diverse skill sets need to do convergent scholarshipwith other researchers. Students G (2019), AC (2021), W (2021), A (2021), and H (2021) alldiscussed this issue with comments such as, “it’s really hard to become an expert on somethingthat …[I] never cared about before.”In essence, the siloed