The "Attract, Retain, and Graduate Young Life Scientists (ARGYLES)" project at Rivier University will support and engage students majoring in biology as emergent scientists who will contribute to the vitality of the STEM pipeline in the Northeast. The program will recruit and enroll 10 low-income, academically talented students (five each in two cohorts) and will provide scholarships for four years. ARGYLES will strengthen the biology community at Rivier and create a feedback loop of confidence and motivation to help students both learn science and identify themselves as scientists, two key criteria for persistence to graduation in STEM disciplines. The goal of the program will be for 90% of scholars to complete their first two years of the biology program, and 80% will be retained until graduation. Upon graduation students will either continue to graduate school or find employment in a STEM field. Recruitment efforts will focus on low-income, underrepresented minority, and first-generation students.
Through the use of a persistence framework that fosters students' professional identification, confidence, and motivation to succeed, the project will provide an innovative, integrated approach to building community that enables students to be supported by peers, faculty, and other academic resources. With guidance from a social science researcher from the Department of Psychology and an external evaluator, the project evaluation will examine the effectiveness of these program strategies and will generate evidence that can be used to support sustained programming and propagation to other departments and institutions. The project will benefit both individual scholarship recipients, but will contribute to shaping Rivier's STEM academic and support systems as the university focuses on building community and promoting global engagement.
