New grant to help science, tech majors stay the course

BERKELEY

Over the past 22 years, UC Berkeleys Biology Scholars Program has successfully mentored some 2,900 undergraduates mostly low-income, first-generation, women or minority students through tough courses in highly competitive majors.

Now, a new five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will help the program share its successful strategies for supporting and retaining undergraduate biology majors throughout the Berkeley campus, in areas ranging from chemical biology to environmental science.

Third-year student Jessica Reyes, a pre-med English major, shares her sentiments about the Biology Scholars Program.

My goal is to help all students succeed in biology at Berkeley, with a special emphasis on those from underrepresented ethnic minority, first-generation and low-income backgrounds, said John Matsui, co-founder and director of the program.

Low-income and first-generation students experience the greatest disparities in performance because they often come from under-resourced high schools and communities, he added. My students have both the motivation and aptitude to do science. Berkeley Scholars Program-style advising, tutoring and instruction within a socially and academically supportive environment have helped students reveal their potential to succeed.

The result? The programs students, on average, enter Berkeley with lower SATs and GPAs than their majority peers, yet graduate with biology degrees with comparable final GPAs and in equivalent percentages, he said.

Sharing successful strategies

The grant, announced today (Thursday, May 29), will allow Matsui to distill his successful interventions into training materials that can be shared via workshops campus-wide across the many disciplines in the biological sciences.

The techniques developed over the years to decrease attrition rates for underrepresented students are scalable and generalizable, Matsui said, and should help his colleagues more effectively counsel, tutor and teach any undergraduate who may be tempted to switch majors, or drop out of college entirely, when faced with coursework and science culture at Berkeley that is more challenging and less hospitable than he or she expected.

Originally posted here:
New grant to help science, tech majors stay the course