Background
The PROMISE Engineering Institute (PEI) was established as a discipline-specific initiative, inspired by the NSF EHR/HRD/AGEP program, to broaden participation in 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 in AGEP (and other STEM-based programs dedicated to faculty diversity) 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 diverse 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 to Promote Diversity
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 (an HBCU), Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). UC Davis and UMBC are both Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), and this collection of universities within this east-west network, have additional MSIs which include a subset of schools with Department of Education designations for HSI and HBCU
The PEI 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 online 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 scholars will be not be attending the conferences (whether online or later in person) to simply observe. Their participation will be facilitated by the leadership team, and they will be invited to actively engage as full members of these engineering communities. In this era of COVID, the need to open networks and facilitate community is more important than ever. Renetta Tull has already been paving the way for engagement of the stakeholders of the PEI in 2020-21 by discussing pending participation in upcoming conferences for the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) webinars and meetings with members of the Global Engineering Deans Council and the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies, online activities with the Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions, activities connected to the American Society of Engineering Education, the SREB Institute for Teaching and Mentoring, the Academic and Research Leadership (ARL) Network for academics in engineering and science, and others. As an initial pilot for this idea, Renetta Tull invited Dr. Gary S. May, Chancellor of UC Davis and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (former Dean of Engineering at Georgia Tech) to meet with engineering students from UMBC and UM College Park to talk about leadership and research pathways. The meeting was a resounding success, and was met with requests for more meetings in the future.