Board 299: Impact of Socialization on Graduate Student Education

According to congressional reports in 2005 and 2010 (Rising Above the Gathering Storm Committee, 2010) and the National Science Foundation's State of US Science and Engineering (NSB, NSF, 2022), the number of graduates of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs at all levels does not meet the need of the industry. This need is more urgent at the graduate, specifically, the master's level (NSF, NSB, 2022). Our goal has been to create and institutionalize best practices for the recruitment, retention, and timely graduation of master's students to create a sustainable pipeline to address this need at the graduate level. Hence, we attempted to expand this pipeline by creating an environment that attracts, supports, and retains historically or traditionally marginalized or minoritized and diverse populations. According to the literature, there are a series of activities that are proven for the recruitment and retention of low-income and academically talented, and/or first-generation and historically or traditionally marginalized or minoritized populations (LIATFGURM) students at the undergraduate level (Hernandez et al., 2018; Kendricks et al., 2019; Lisberg & Woods, 2018). However, this has not been validated at the graduate level. Therefore, the Scholarships for Engineering Graduate Students Program (SEGSP; pseudonym) was crafted to support these populations in pursuing a master's degree in engineering. This study seeks to explore ways in which SEGSP can impact recruitment and retention in engineering master's programs by attending to components of socialization (Weidman et al., 2001). The scholars in this program are Master's students in the College of Engineering, and the institution is an R2 (doctoral university with high research activity) university. Thus, the utilization of the graduate- and professional-student socialization framework-for this Master's level program-was in response to the fact that LIATFGUR students often report inequitable socialization opportunities (Roksa et al., 2018). The results of this study can potentially inform stakeholders who seek strategies to recruit and support LIATFGURM students in graduate programs.