SIGCSE 2020 Pre-Symposium Event by the SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges
Contributed by Megan Olsen, mmolsen@loyola.edu
Are you willing to facilitate this discussion? Yes
Are there any others whom you would recommend as potential facilitators for this topic? No
One challenge at a liberal arts institution is recruitment of strong STEM students, as well as increasing awareness of STEM programs. At Loyola University Maryland, the majority of our majors on campus are in the humanities or business, and we are trying to improve our STEM reputation off campus. As a private liberal arts college we struggle to recruit and retain students who are high achieving, low income, minority, and/or first generation. To combat this challenge, we have developed an interdisciplinary STEM scholars program for computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, and data science majors called CPaMS Scholars. The scholars program was initially funded by an NSF S-STEM grant, and is being continued by the university. Our goal is to recruit and retain a diverse set of high-achieving, low income students in these majors, with an initial focus on students from the Baltimore area. We provide need-based scholarships of up to $10K/year for each student. Students are admitted as a cohort of 6-16 students across the relevant majors, and take one course together each of their first 3 years including a 1-credit career-focused seminar. These courses are interdisciplinary. The students are provided with a more STEM-focused advising structure in their first year than they would have received otherwise, and have exclusive internship opportunities. Students must maintain a 3.0 in-major GPA to stay in the program. Surveys of CPaMS scholars indicate that the cohort makes the transition from high school to college easier, both socially and academically. The cohort continued to be useful as they took upper-division courses and looked to fellow classmates for help. The career component of the program was also a selling point for attracting students to apply. We are currently about to graduate our first cohort, who have excelled in coursework, hack-a-thons, internships, summer research, and leadership. For the SIGCSE liberal arts symposium we hope to share what we have learned from this program, and facilitate discussion on other ideas for how to utilize interdisciplinary opportunities within STEM to strengthen liberal arts computer science departments.