STEM on the Road: The Soft Side of Recruitment

There are many types of work that fall under the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) umbrella that students often do not consider when making career choices.Manufacturing and healthcare industries, government, and philanthropic agencies are among those that continually push future generations to pursue careers in STEM-related fields.As exposure to STEM careers expands, higher education recruitment and outreach efforts become more varied resulting in camps, workshops, or other short sessions that focus on helping prospective college students understand the various aspects of STEM disciplines.This paper details how Purdue University Northwest (PNW) took a novel approach to STEM outreach by developing a peer-to-peer "STEM on the Road" (SotR) program.This initiative took the emphasis off recruitment and placed it on STEM college students sharing their collegiate competition and individualized research projects with high school and middle school students.The program helped the college students transport their projects, whether they were small handheld electronics or full-sized competition vehicles, to area high schools and middle schools for a one-day exhibit.While on-site, the STEM students spent the day sharing their research, discussing the transition from high school to college, and mentoring their younger peers.Details of the grass-roots history of this initiative are included.How STEM on the Road was launched using internal funding sources will be explained along with how the initiative pivoted during the global pandemic to offer a "STEM on the Net" version of itself.The current state of the initiative will also be discussed to show how it has evolved to support changes in the University's strategic plan for diversity.