Requirements For Participation

To ensure that institution-specific action plans developed at and following the symposia emanate from an informed consideration of current practices, specific pre-symposium work is required of all teams planning to attend the symposium.

  1. Comparison of successful and unsuccessful undergraduate diversity-in-science initiatives reveals that strong commitment by both administrators and faculty is required for any action plan to work. Thus each participating team must include at least one high-level administrator (President, VP, Provost, Dean) and one science faculty member. Students from underrepresented groups will also be encouraged to attend, both as future scientific leaders and to provide important perspectives. Other than the requirement for at least one high-level administrator and one science faculty member, the determination of size and composition of a team is at each institution’s discretion.
  2. Prior to the symposium, each participating team must:
    1. Gather relevant institutional data on underrepresented minority participation in undergraduate science programs. The excel datasheet available below provides a template for this institutional analysis.
    2. Establish its own definitions of “success” for mentoring and retention programs.
    3. Articulate a set of goals and an action plan aimed at achieving success.
    4. Submit institutional data to Billy Biederman, Grants Systems Assistant, HHMI; [email protected], 301.215.8895. Deadline for UW symposium: 2PM (EST) on Monday, October 23, 2006. Each institution’s data will be kept confidential. Data from all participating teams will be aggregated by Billy Biederman, HHMI, and a professional consultant retained by the consortium. These aggregate data may be presented at subsequent symposia (e.g., selections from aggregate data from Harvard and ULM symposium participants may be presented at the UW symposium). The Excel Datasheet can be found below.
  3. We’ve distilled relevant readings to the following list of 6 references, which will be helpful to your pre-symposium discussions.

Readings for Download (PDF Format)

All articles are copyrighted by their respective authors and publishers. They are provided for download only to single users for academic purposes

  1. Summers and Hrabowski (2006). Preparing Minority Scientists and Engineers. Science 311, 1870-1871.
  2. Steele, Claude (1997). A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance. American Psychologist 52, 613-629.
  3. Cohen and Steele (2002). A Barrier of Mistrust: How Negative Stereotypes Affect Cross-Race Mentoring. In Improving Academic Achievement, Chapter 15, Elsevier Science (USA).
  4. Gandara, Patricia and Julie Maxwell-Jolly (1999). Priming the Pump: Strategies for increasing the achievement of underrepresented minority undergraduates. The College Board.
  5. Matsui, John, Liu, Roger, and Caroline M. Kane (2003).Evaluating a Science Diversity Program at UC Berkeley: More Questions Than Answers. Cell Biology Education 2, 117-121.
  6. Fullilove, Robert E., and Philip Uri Treisman (1990). Mathematics Achievement Among African American Undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley: An Evaluation of the Mathematics Workshop Program. Journal of Negro Education 59, 463-478.

Extended reading list

Two Datasheets: Gateways data and Majors data (Excel Format)

Please download the Gateways Data Sheet and the Majors Data Sheet for collection of institutional data.

Also download this accompanying instructions document, which explains the aims of the Gateways and Majors data collection.

You may also download recommended guidelines to define “low income”, based on annual U.S. Census data.