Helping Underrepresented Groups

Stony Brook and Old Westbury had NSF Research Careers for Minority Scholars grants that recently expired and they are continuing some of those efforts with institutional funds (the Consortium has played a major role in securing this continuing support). Old Westbury, Stony Brook, and York College have state-funded Science/Technology Entry Programs for minority students. (Note: The private four-year colleges in the Consortium have small numbers of minority students in total, especially in mathematics and the natural sciences, and so efforts for underrepresented minorities will be concentrated at the public institutions in the Consortium.) Farmingdale recently started a Treisman-type workshop program for minority students in mathematics.

Consortium PI David Ferguson is project director on a $5M NSF grant called Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP), that was awarded in late 1996, for increasing minority participation in engineering in the SUNY system. On Long Island, AMP will work with the Consortium to develop a variety of underrepresented minority support efforts at Consortium institutions in mathematics and the natural sciences as well. AMP is in turn counting on help from the Consortium to foster systemic change in instructional practices, for as Sheila Tobias has noted, improved instructional practices in mathematics, science and engineering "disproportionately benefit" underrepresented groups.

Stony Brook has a large Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) project jointly funded by NSF and institutional resources. The WISE program, with Consortium support, has started planning with faculty at Farmingdale, Nassau C.C. and Suffolk C.C. to export the WISE efforts to those institutions. Private colleges will begin to be involved next year.

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The Long Island Consortium is sponsored by the NSF Initiative: Mathematical Sciences and Their Application Throughout the Curriculum, DUE #9555142. The original NSF proposal can be accessed by clicking here.