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Harvard Symposium
Takes a Scientific Approach
November 18-19, 2005
As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Orlando Yarborough III took part in a campus diversity program that he described as a “prominent community of scholars, composed of peers who look like me.” That community was not a social club but rather an academic team that allowed Yarborough—now a Ph.D. student at Yale University—to imagine for the first time that he, an African American male, could become a scientist.
Participants at the first Diversity in the Sciences symposium, held at Harvard University from November 18–19, 2005, gathered to learn how to adopt or adapt programs that provide inspiration and support for students like Yarborough. Speakers made it clear that they advocated approaching the diversity issue as they would any research problem—by trying to identify the factors in successful diversity programs and replicate them in other university settings.
“A lot of people put diversity in that warm-and-fuzzy category. We have never looked upon this question with the kind of serious eye that we give to scientific questions,” said Freeman Hrabowski, president of UMBC.
“We decided to take the show on the road, so to speak,” said Michael Summers, a biochemist and HHMI investigator at UMBC who shared the winning formula for his campus’s Meyerhoff Scholarship Program. “There has to be a way of taking the parts of effective mentoring programs—the leaders, the data, the indicators of success, the fund-raising—and somehow catalyze the use of those tools in other places that are primed for change.”
Many complex and interrelated reasons contribute to the drop-off of URM student numbers in science, participants said. Many URM students come from low-income families and might be the first in their family to attend college. Their personal situations make it harder to balance working for pay in order to support themselves with participating in volunteer research opportunities and navigating the unfamiliar terrain of a laboratory. Some URM students arrive at college ill-prepared for science courses or struggling with the study skills needed at the university level.
URM students can also feel isolated, especially as they progress in science, finding fewer peers and mentors with whom they can identify. Often, URM students struggle to understand how scientific research progresses, what their roles are as undergraduates in the research enterprise, and how to get their feet wet doing lab work. Add the competitive nature of many introductory science courses to the mix, and the entire science package can send URM students fleeing to majors that seem far more “user-friendly.”
After identifying some of the problems, participants learned about possible solutions from several universities that have excelled at graduating URM students from science departments. UMBC and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, for example, consistently graduate record numbers of African Americans holding degrees in biochemistry and chemistry. The Biology Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley, helps more URM students graduate with a biology degree and a higher GPA than URM students who do not participate in the program.
As an African American female physics student 25 years ago, speaker Evelynn Hammonds noted that she had no diversity programs to help her but overcame stacked odds nonetheless. She said her success was due in part to her scientific mentors—most of whom were white males. Hammonds, now senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity at Harvard University, underscored the challenge facing participants: “The issue before us is to try to understand what are the important factors in making a scientist and then ensure that everyone who wants to pursue science and engineering has a fair chance to do so.”
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