| Abstrakt: |
Initial cohort selection for a NSF DUE funded, holistic student support and scholarship program began in late 2020. Programmatic elements include a scholarship, a summer bridge program, and weekly embedded mental health sessions among other elements. The program was developed from ideation, which provided the opportunity to rethink the scholarship application process, and a holistic, semiblinded application process was created. The selection process had two rounds: a blind first round and a second round interview. A bias and blindspot training was developed to prepare the selection committee for the review process, and all members were required to participate in this training. In the first round, all applications were redacted of any wording related to race, gender, sex, and other personal identifiers. The second round interviews were conducted over Zoom. For both rounds, a rubric was developed to look for specific applicant characteristics such as grit, teachability, open-mindedness, as well as other traits. The results of the selection process yielded a cohort with the following characteristics. Regarding selfidentification of sex, the application pool consisted of 41% women, and 60% of students who were invited to apply for the scholarship self-identified as women. Of those who submitted applications to the program, 40.7% were women. The final program cohort was 42.8% women. With respect to BIPOCs, 26.5% of the application pool identified as BIPOC, and of these, BIPOCs comprised 16.67% of the submitted applications and 42% of students who accepted the offer were BiPOCs. Our results suggest that the process used to invite and interview students was successful at recruiting a diverse cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
