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Session 2470

Summer Bridge to Engineering1

M. Catharine Hudspeth, J. Winthrop Aldrich California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Introduction For the past six years Cal Poly Pomona’s colleges of Engineering and Science have collaborated to conduct a four-week residential transition program, Quest I, for incoming minority students and selected community college students. This program, funded jointly by the campus, the National Science Foundation Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP) grant, and California MESA, has served three hundred students. Three threads will be discussed: program overview and philosophy, the curriculum and impact upon faculty, and, finally, the perspectives of facilitators and participants with some statistical analysis of program impact on student retention and academic performance.

Program Overview and Philosophy To set the program in context, Cal Poly Pomona is a large, urban campus drawing mostly students from middle- and working-class homes in the greater Los Angeles area. The “typical” student expects to commute to campus and to work while attending college. The challenges to faculty are several: -The variability of the high school and community college preparation of incoming students does not equip many of them for the much higher level of competition and intellectual sophistication required by science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) majors. -The compartmentalization of their previous education is not conducive to the synthesis of material across disciplines that is necessary for sophisticated problem solving. -The bulk of the students do not submerge themselves in the intellectual life of the campus because of commuting, family, and work commitments. -Most Latino and African American students perceive academic success in terms of isolated, individual effort in a competitive environment.

The campus has two well-developed academic support programs for historically under- represented students in SEM majors: Maximizing Engineering Potential (MEP) in the College of Engineering and Science Educational Enhancement Services (SEES) in the College of Science. These two programs offer extensive services to new and continuing students once they have matriculated. The Quest I program offers the opportunity for MEP and SEES to provide an intensive intellectual and cultural experience to a subset of the incoming Latino and African American freshmen and transfer students in SEM majors. This group of participants forms a core that leads all incoming students to more sophisticated participation and performance. The goals of the program are several: - To provide a challenging curriculum in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. - To show the interdependence of these three disciplines. - To strengthen problem-solving skills with the aid of graphing calculators. - To reinforce the value of collaborative work in all classes and activities.

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Aldrich, W. J., & Hudspeth, M. C. (2000, June), Summer Bridge To Engineering Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8730