The project consists of three activities: a bridge program for freshman, a mentoring programs for freshman and transfer students, and a residential learning community for freshman students. Additionally a transfer-student recruiting program provides a structured effort to work with Virginia community colleges to facilitate the successful transition of community college graduates to Virginia Tech. These programs are based on existing, and highly successful, programs for under-represented engineering students. By expanding these programs to a larger population of freshman and transfer students, we expect to improve the overall graduation rate for all students entering the engineering and computer science programs. The Student Transition Program enables 100 students to spend five weeks at Virginia Tech prior to their freshman year learning what they must do to adjust to the rigors of undergraduate engineering and computer science education. A weeklong transition program for transfer students ensures that they establish a firm initial connection to engineering and computer science faculty and staff. The mentoring program facilitates development of peer mentoring relationships that assist 400 freshmen and 60 transfer students to negotiate undergraduate degree programs successfully. Finally, the Galileo residential program allows 200 freshmen to be a part of a mutually supportive living and learning environment. The goal is to increase the freshman and transfer student first to second year retention by 3%-5% each year of the funding period, resulting in a minimum of 85% first to second year retention for each group. This should translate into approximately 300 more graduates annually. The proposed activities are demonstrating how undergraduate institutions can successfully increase their retention of all undergraduate students by broadly applying existing practices that have been developed to address under-represented engineering student retention. Dissemination of the results of the proposed activities is enabling other undergraduate institutions to understand how to implement these programs on a larger scale.
