Background
The PROMISE Engineering Institute was established as a discipline-specific initiative for future engineering tenure-track faculty. The focus is on graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career faculty en route to tenure. The program was developed after observing that many engineering graduate students were disengaging from pursuit of faculty careers in lieu of choosing non-academic careers, particularly in industry. The feedback was that the students didn’t have enough relationships with engineering faculty within their networks, they were missing confident skills related to building research trajectories, and they were curious about connections to industry because they feared missing out on developing high-tech skills in a changing economy.
Coast-to-Coast Collaboration
The overall network will be led by the “west coast branch” at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). The program will keep its original partners and will extend offerings to engineering stakeholders at 8 additional schools within the University of California (system) with Colleges of Engineering. These include: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Merced, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. Similarly, the “east coast branch,” led by UMBC (via sub-award) will extend offerings to the engineering colleges in Maryland and the surrounding area, with emphasis on Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP).
The PROMISE Engineering Institute will continue to work with UMBC, Morgan State, UMCP, and JHU, and will expand its reach to include constituents from the 8 other campuses of the University of California system that have schools of engineering. A key to this east-west connection will be the forming of networks and the deliberate infusion of national and international connections where the leaders of the conferences have committed to engaging the cohorts of scholars in activities. The need to open networks is more important than ever. The leadership team works with students to facilitate mentoring networks.