Impact And Results Of Minority Engineering Student Advising And Mentoring For Career Advancement
- Conference
- Location
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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2008
- Start Date
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June 22, 2008
- End Date
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June 25, 2008
- ISSN
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2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Minorities in Engineering
- Page Count
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10
- Page Numbers
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13.687.1 - 13.687.10
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--4394
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/4394
- Download Count
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414
Paper Authors
Tokunbo Ogunfunmi Santa Clara University
TOKUNBO OGUNFUNMI, Ph.D., P.E. is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California. He earned his BSEE (First Class Honors) from Obafemi Awolowo University, (formerly University of Ife), Nigeria, his MSEE and PhDEE from Stanford University, Stanford, California. His teaching and research interests span the areas of Digital Signal Processing (theory, applications and implementations), Adaptive Systems, VLSI/ASIC Design and Multimedia Signal Processing. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, Member of Sigma Xi, AAAS and ASEE.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
Impact and Results of Minority Engineering Student Advising and Mentoring for Career Advancement 1
Abstract
Minority students in graduate school in engineering in the United States are quite few. The numbers are even fewer in small private schools. For example, statistics of black minority undergraduate students in electrical engineering are less than 5% in many small catholic private universities such as Santa Clara University. Given that not all of the undergraduates go on to graduate school in electrical engineering, the numbers are even fewer in graduate school, typically less than 1%.
The reality of low minority enrollment numbers in engineering and in electrical engineering in particular is unacceptable. Therefore, it is important to offer minority undergraduate and graduate students in engineering mentoring on the issues of retention, graduation and career advancement.
Recently, we began a program at our university to improve these statistics. This program is initially funded by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation. The preliminary results and the impact of our multi-faceted grant activities are presented in this paper.
Introduction
It is a well-known problem that the number of minority students in engineering in the United States is very small. In [1], we presented some of our findings and recommendations to rectify the situation especially regarding the number of minority graduate students in electrical engineering.
Over the last year some of the recommendations have been implemented, thanks to a grant from the James Irvine Foundation at Santa Clara University.
In this paper, we report on the impact of some of the recommendations. The focus of our paper is on the undergraduate student population and the impact of the recommendations on their initial experience at our institution.
We also give an overview of how our institution has developed and embraced many of the recommendations for implementation for engineering undergraduate minority students.
The paper is divided into five sections. In Section 2, we start with the motivation for this paper. Here, we also re-state the problem as we perceive it. In Section 3, we give some background about the school of engineering at Santa Clara University. We also present some of the institutional
1 This work was supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation
Ogunfunmi, T. (2008, June), Impact And Results Of Minority Engineering Student Advising And Mentoring For Career Advancement Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4394
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