Early career and remote undergraduate research experiences as catalysts for more impactful community college STEM opportunities

This paper presents a successful model of preparing community college students for summer Undergraduate Research Experiences (UREs) that may be of interest to other community college faculty. Over the past four years, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) summer URE program at Purdue large research University has created URE opportunities for community college students. This paper describes a 4-year partnership between faculty at Pasadena City College (PCC), which consists of 55% of students from underrepresented populations, and research groups in Engineering Schools at Purdue. During the URE summer program, community college students worked side-by-side with both fellow undergraduate student researchers and graduate student mentors on a research project. Interviews and surveys demonstrated that students had a positive experience in pre-summer research experience and that performing research in advance of the summer URE better prepared them to work in the more advanced laboratory at Purdue. Several students and faculty mentors will share their individual experiences as part of this paper. Overall, ten students have participated in the URE partnership. Of these, eight have transferred to 4-year universities and seven have continued performing research, with five being co-authors on peer-reviewed science-based research publications. Furthermore, four are currently enrolled in graduate school after graduating from their 4-year program. Looking forward, the PCC-Purdue partnership will evolve to include remote learning. To further increase the program impact, faculty and students from Purdue and research faculty and students from PCC will meet remotely during the academic year to discuss aspects of the projects. This learning experience will involve a higher greater number of community college student participants in this Remote Undergraduate Research Experience (R-URE) and better prepare them to participate in the summer URE.