Developing an adaptable and sustainable model for immersive faculty career exploration at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs)

Careers in the professoriate at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) may represent a good fit for trainees who want to remain in academia. Retaining talent in the biomedical and life sciences professoriate at PUIs will be critical to the training of undergraduates for careers in the STEM workforce. Early-career scientists seeking insights into career paths available at PUIs and small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) rarely have opportunities for on-site immersive career exploration and capacitation. While some programs exist, these are often short-term and rarely immersive, likely failing to expose trainees to some of the unique features and benefits of careers at PUIs and SLACs. Such programs are not described in the literature in a way that can enable interested institutions to adopt or replicate their successful elements. Our program aims to fill this gap by leveraging well-established resources (Collaborative Teaching Fellows Program at Goucher College and Stevenson University and Center for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching at Goucher College) to create a cohort-based model for PUI career exploration that can be adopted by other institutions, especially those near biomedical and life sciences research-intensive institutions. We call this program ACCESS (Accomplishing Career Exploration for Scientist Scholars) to PUIs. In this <i>Curriculum</i> article, we share the structure of the program and the outcomes of our program. The outcomes include those connected to trainees' preparedness to adapt their research for PUIs.