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CS@Mines: PATH Ambassadors to High Success, A Successful S-STEM Scholarship Program

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topics

Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

6

DOI

10.18260/1-2--36884

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/36884

Download Count

312

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Paper Authors

biography

Tracy Camp Colorado School of Mines

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Tracy Camp is a Full Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. She is the Founder and Director of the Toilers (http://toilers.mines.edu), an active ad hoc networks research group.

Her current research interests include the credibility of ad hoc network simulation studies and the use of wireless sensor networks in geosystems. Dr. Camp has received over 20 grants from the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award. In total, her projects have received over $20 million dollars in external funding. This funding has produced 12 software packages that have been requested from (and shared with) more than 3000 researchers in 86 countries (as of October 2012). Dr. Camp has published over 80 refereed articles and 12 invited articles, and these articles have been cited almost 4,000 times (per Microsoft Academic Search) and over 7,000 times (per Google Scholar) as of December 2012.

Dr. Camp is an ACM Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Lecturer, and an IEEE Fellow. She has enjoyed being a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand (in 2006), a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Bonn in Germany (in 2010), and a keynote presenter at several venues, e.g., at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2011) in Adelaide, Australia, and the 3rd International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools 2010) in Malaga, Spain. In December 2007, Dr. Camp received the Board of Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award at the Colorado School of Mines; this award was only given five times between 1998-2007.

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Christine Liebe Colorado School of Mines

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Heather Thiry

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Abstract

The primary purpose of the Path Ambassadors to High Success (PATHS), an NSF-funded S-STEM scholarship program, is to create compelling new pathways and strengthen existing pathways for academically talented, low-income Colorado high school and community college students to study Computer Science (CS) at Colorado School of Mines (Mines). PATHS has achieved the following major project goals: 1) Increase number of academically talented, low-income students studying CS in Colorado; 2) Establish active on-campus community to support PATHS Scholars and similar students; 3) Engage Scholars to perform CS recruitment and outreach at area high schools and community colleges; 4) Increase retention of similarly situated students; 5) Evaluate PATHS activities through comparative analysis to provide new insights on best practices for attracting and retaining academically talented, low-income CS students; 6) Broaden participation in CS of historically underrepresented groups; and 7) Develop a new flexible degree program combining other STEM fields and CS, with specific appeal to low-income students who often do not have access to CS education. Because ~70\% of schools in Colorado do not offer CS, low-income students may think they want to be a traditional engineer but find they love CS. PATHS students are diverse (28.6\% female, 40.8\% underrepresented students in computing, and 36.7\% first generation) and academically successful (mean GPA 3.4 and 38\% have GPAs of 3.5 or higher). The program has awarded scholarships to 49 students thus far, and produced six graduates, three Master's students majoring in CS, and has a 93.8\% retention rate.

Camp, T., & Liebe, C., & Thiry, H. (2021, July), CS@Mines: PATH Ambassadors to High Success, A Successful S-STEM Scholarship Program Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--36884

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