bachelor’s degrees may be eager to enter the engineering workforce. However,in many engineering disciplines, individuals have more earning potential and career trajectoryoptions with a master’s degree. In this paper, we identify several categories of barriers and lessonslearned to launching an S-STEM focused on graduate students at a large R1 public institution thatmay be useful to other such programs. These include discussions on recruitment of this specializedpopulation of students into graduate school, especially those from other institutions, can bedifficult because i) there are structural and legal barriers to accessing financial information aboutstudents to identify low-income students and ii) smaller institutions may not have the
Venkataraman, San Diego State University Satchi Venkataraman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering. He has served as Graduate Advisor for the Aerospace Engineering program (17 years) and as an Associate Director at the Computational Sciences Research Center at San Diego State University (11 years). His expertise is in computational mechanics and optimization applied to design of lightweight and durable composite aircraft structures. He has extensive experience in developing programs for student professional development and broadening participation (co-PI and PI on three NSF S-STEM grants). ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024Exploring Interdisciplinary Identity Formation in
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