Empowering informatics Diversity Enhanced Workforce (EiDEW) is a multi-institutional project proposed by the Indiana University (IU) School of Informatics and Computing (SoIC) at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Ivy Tech Community College (Ivy Tech) in Indianapolis. The project seeks to increase the quality and quantity of information technology (IT) professionals - especially economically disadvantaged, academically talented underrepresented minorities - who graduate from college. The EiDEW Scholar program will not only recruit, provide scholarship support to, and educate 80 associate and 60 baccalaureate students, but also create a rich framework of coherent interventions to ensure student persistence in STEM. Typical interventions planned include mentoring, internships and other types of support from freshman year through degree completion. Close to graduation, EiDEW will partner with employers such as Microsoft to facilitate student career placement in the STEM workforce.
Student recruitment will be facilitated by leveraging previously established connections with high schools. In previous NSF-funded research, IUPUI had success with the residential learning community model and cohort-based mentoring. These will be adapted and used in the EiDEW project. The informatics curriculum is based on active learning pedagogies with both Microsoft and CISCO providing various professional certification training during the summer. The project will potentially generate systematic knowledge regarding the value of combining co-curricular activities with provision of scholarship support for talented but financially needy college students. The consortium arrangement between Ivy Tech and IUPUI will provide a national model for two-year to four-year college transition in the S-STEM context.
