This project will take a diverse group of undergraduate students each year to the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society, the largest professional society in our discipline. The organizers, members of the Diversity Committee of the Animal Behavior Society, will advertize, identify and select participants who are members of underrepresented groups, low income, first generation, and currently attending schools at which there are few opportunities for research. Ten students each year will be provided with funds to cover all travel, housing, and registration expenses. In addition to attending all meeting events, the students will participate in training activities designed to make sure they get the most out of the meetings. Each student will also be matched with mentors with whom they can interact during the meeting itself. In 2009, the ABS meetings will be hosted in Brazil, offering an important international experience for our students. Based on recent experience, we expect at least 60% of undergraduate award winners to be members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups. Moreover, in written surveys, almost 90% of students who participated in our program activities agreed that they were more likely to go into graduate research in science as a result of having attended the ABS meetings. More than 80% report having had informal interactions with scientists at the meetings who are likely to have an impact on their future careers. The program provides a unique opportunity for graduate training faculty to meet and interact closely with future doctoral students who are members of underrepresented groups.
During the four years of our project, we provided 40 undergraduate students with the opportunity to attend and to participate actively in four annual meetings of the Animal Behavior Society. The Animal Behavior Society annual meeting is the most important conference of behavioral researchers in the Americas, bringing together hundreds of professionals from the United States, Canada, Central and South America to discuss animal behavior research as conducted in academia, zoos, public and private industry. During this project, the conferences were held at Indiana University (Bloomington IN), University of New Mexico (Albuquerque NM), College of William & Mary (VA), and University of Colorado (Boulder CO). With NSF funds and help from Indiana University and the Animal Behavior Society, our program organized all logistical arrangements for the students and paid all of their travel expenses. In addition, we created several mentoring activities to help the students get the most they could out of the conference. We organized and led a one-day pre-meeting workshop including panel discussions and role-playing exercises, we matched each student with a faculty-level researcher with similar interests or professional goals to serve as that student’s mentor throughout the conference, and we hosted a luncheon for all undergraduate researchers at the conference, giving them an opportunity to network and also to listen to a set of short presentations about graduate school and other research opportunities from researchers across the country. Our special efforts to recruit applications that represented a broad diversity of human and educational experiences largely succeeded, such that 20 of the 40 students (50%) were members of underrepresented groups (African, Latino, and Native Americans).
