WIP: Developing the Husky PAWS S-STEM Scholar Application

This work in progress innovative practice paper is focused on the development of S-STEM scholarship application. The purpose of the National Science Foundation's S-STEM program is to provide support for “academically talented lowincome students” through scholarships and accompanying programming, which fosters their recruitment, retention, and ultimately their graduation with STEM degrees [1]. The S-STEM program requires awardees to provide for all of the annual unmet financial need of individual Pell-eligible scholars, up to $15,000 per undergraduate scholar and $20,000 per graduate scholar. The S-STEM dollars must be applied after all other funding sources have been exhausted for a student. Awardees may develop recruitment programs within disadvantaged communities and under resourced schools to attract students to apply for the scholarship. However, selection cannot be based upon race/ ethnicity/ gender demographic criteria. This in-development project, the Husky PAWS Pathways for Academic Wellness and Success) program, will implement a unique adaptation of Yosso's Cultural Wealth Model [2] to elevate students' existing assets, with the goal of increasing retention, success indicators, and raising Pell-eligible students' graduation rates to non-Pell levels. The project will support students in engineering, computing, and physics majors by funding approximately six scholars each of the first three years. Scholars will receive annual scholarships ranging from $2,000 - $20,000 based on established criteria and unmet financial need - with options for one-time finishing scholarships as well. However, the anticipated applicant pool is over 1,000 eligible students. Thus, the first project challenge - beyond advertising the scholarships and recruiting applicants - is to refine appropriate application materials. To develop these application materials, a series of questions were proposed to inform the S-STEM team about additional indicators of financial need among students (such as experiencing food insecurity, experiencing the foster care system, etc.). However, the team acknowledged that some of these questions may alienate students. To address this concern, the criteria questions were refined, along with their framing language, through focus group feedback from existing Pell-eligible students on campus, to reduce the risk of alienating prospective students with whom we aim to build connections.