This project continues and expands a previous S-STEM project to further encourage students to persist in completion of degrees in STEM. The College of St. Catherine, a women's college in Minnesota, identified several barriers to persistence in STEM majors among their S-STEM Scholars. Accordingly, they structured the program to identify individual scholars as "diamonds in the rough" (entering first-year students), "continuing" (previous scholars whose records allow them to retain their scholarships), "late comers" (students who enter undeclared or considering non-STEM majors, but who later decide to pursue a STEM major), and "tenacity" (students whose records prevent them from being in the continuing category, but who demonstrate a love of their major discipline despite their academic difficulty). Each group of students is offered a different combination of support from scholarship funds, tutoring, and specially designed courses that use science applications in the teaching of mathematics. Already dealing with an exclusively female student population with financial need, the new program is establishing contacts within two predominant immigrant communities in the area, the Hmong and Somali, and actively recruiting these underrepresented student groups into the scholarship program. Over the course of the five-year project, at least 65 scholarships will have been awarded. Graduates of St. Catherine's have succeeded in entering and completing graduate programs and in the workforce. Thus this project plays a major role in expanding access to STEM careers.
