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Being able to make friends has always been one of the top five most helpful experiences in ASPIRE. One interesting point is that it appears the skill set of the students has changed. In 1995 and 1996, skills regarding study skills and time management were rated as important. The participants in the other cohorts were focused more on the academic side.

Conclusions

The successful thing about ASPIRE is building a routine for the students. The data collected on the program demonstrates that student’s benefit from the classes, leadership, and team building workshops. This feedback is essential to continual improvement of ASPIRE. For example feedback received from the students resulted in the addition of the engineering problem solving course during the summer component. This need was evidenced by poor performance in Engineering Fundamentals 1015 (Introduction to Engineering) by both ASPIRE and non- ASPIRE students.

As another example, survey data revealed that the students felt under-prepared to handle the Matlab assignments in the introduction to engineering and calculus classes. The next year Matlab programming was added to the summer program. Feedback from participants, faculty and staff is essential to keep pace with an ever changing undergraduate engineering curriculum. The activities for the ASPIRE participants must be consistently viewed through different lenses, those of the various constituencies during both the summer component and the freshman academic year.

Biography DR. BEVLEE A. WATFORD, P.E. is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. She is also the founding Director of the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity, established in 1992. Watford was the recipient of the ASEE 2003 Minorities in Engineering award due to her efforts to increase the recruitment, retention and graduation rates of under-represented students in engineering.

TREMAYNE WALLER received a B.S. degree in Liberal Arts Education from Averett University in 1996 and M.S. degree in Counseling from Radford University in 1999. Currently, he is working on a PhD. degree in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He works for the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity at Virginia Tech as the graduate assistant overseeing ASPIRE and THE Pre- College Initiative Program.

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering

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Waller, T., & Watford, B. (2004, June), Aspire Academic Summer Program Introducing Resources For Engineers Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13072