Helping Students Get More than Their Money from an Engineering Scholarship Program

While scholarships can serve as an important source of financial support and motivation for students attending university, they do not guarantee that recipients will graduate on time or graduate at all. Personal, health, and financial issues can conspire to overwhelm students, who then may stumble academically and thus lose their scholarships. To maximize the impact of scholarships, the NSF-funded S-STEM Engineering Leadership Pathway Scholars (ELPS) program provides support and activities to motivate and prepare upper division students to complete B.S. engineering degrees with the attitudes, knowledge, and skills to be leaders in the 21st century workforce and to pursue graduate degrees. Dedicated mentors and frequent interactions with industry professionals have been key to the success of the program. The average graduation rates and time to degree for these students are better than those of the university. Furthermore, ELPS recipients participated at higher rates in research and other professional development programs than typical students at San José State University. This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents results of a post-scholarship survey and follow-on interviews, which indicate that the high-impact practices embedded in ELPS, in particular the mentoring, have had a positive impact on recipients’ leadership skills and attitudes, their career paths, and their overall university experience.