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University of Louisiana Symposium Helps Students Spread Their Wings
April 7-8, 2006
Not having traveled much beyond her small hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana, Tanya Auzenne knew that going to college in Baton Rouge would be an adjustment. But she never imagined spending a summer doing research in New York City—until she did. Malcolm Robinson, who was evacuated from New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck, never thought he would leave a historically black university in his community to attend a predominantly white university in Birmingham, Alabama—until circumstances pushed him beyond his comfort zone.
Helping students like Auzenne and Robinson succeed in science was the focus of the second Diversity in the Sciences symposium, held at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, April 7–8, 2006. Participants discussed how to help underrepresented minority (URM) students on regional campuses—schools that draw nearly all their undergraduates from nearby counties or states—cultivate independence.
In addition to the usual challenges of recruiting and retaining minority students in the sciences, regional campuses face other hurdles that are unique to their mostly local student populations. Their students generally fall into at least one nontraditional category—commuter students, married students with families, students working their way through school, or students supporting extended families. Regional campuses also attract many students who have never traveled beyond their state, so convincing them to pursue research or graduate studies far from home takes a special commitment from mentors, participants said.
The teams of participants, who drove or flew in from neighboring parts of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, discussed a wealth of ideas for effectively recruiting, retaining, and graduating URMs on regional campuses. Students outlined the obstacles they face in attempting to progress in science and described their need to have faculty members who believe in their abilities. Faculty members shared their tactics for striking the right balance between nurturing students and encouraging them to become more independent and confident.
“If we want to close the hole in the bucket and widen the pipeline, then we have to take practical considerations into account as an institution,” said Gloria Thomas, an assistant professor of chemistry at Mississippi State University and an alumna of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She told her own story of needing a flexible work schedule to help her grandmother—the woman who raised her—to recover from surgery. Thomas raised a key question: What does it take to get a student who has never been on a plane, or whose family cannot afford a plane ticket, to attend national scientific meetings?
“Life is happening to these students in a big way around work, around family,” said John Matsui, director of the Biology Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “The more a student differs from the traditional, the more it will take from all of us.”
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