This scholarship program is supporting improved recruitment and retention of academically talented students in STEM fields, with a specific focus on increasing the number of women and other underrepresented minorities in engineering, physics, and computer science. The intellectual merit of this project rests in the opportunities it provides for students to further enhance their education through summer research, study abroad, internships, and leadership training; and to make connections between their major and other disciplines through pursuit of a dual major, minor or interdisciplinary major. A particularly innovative aspect of the latter is the institution's "Converging Technologies" program whose courses explore the unexpected technologies that appear when engineering and liberal arts are brought together in new ways to solve societal problems. All scholarship recipients are enrolled in these integrative courses. These experiences inform the broader impacts of this project through the resulting increase in numbers of students with the education and skills necessary to enter the workforce or professional and graduate programs in emerging multidisciplinary fields.
