Cal State Long Beach has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education in order to increase the number of Latino students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The grant money will be used to develop a program called Promotores de STEM, which will focus on Latinos who are the first in their family to go to college and want to pursue a degree in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.
Students with a GPA below 2.0 to 2.5 will be invited to the program this spring.
Plans include summer programs, connecting Latino STEM students to a faculty mentor and supplemental instruction.
Students who are selected for the supplemental summer session will be awarded a stipend of more than $3,000 for a research project related to their major.
CSULB is one of the top 10 colleges in the nation for awarding bachelors’ and masters’ degrees to Hispanic students.
According to Institutional Research and Assessment at CSULB, in the spring 2011 semester approximately 36 percent of the undergraduate student body was made up of Latinos.
Associate Professor of chemistry and biochemistry Alvaro Monge believes that the number of Hispanic students in STEM majors is low because of a lack of academic support.
“They might start in the STEM field, but they don’t stay there,” Monge said.
Monge went on to say that there are only two Hispanic professors in the college of engineering and he thinks that creates a lack of role models for Hispanic students.
Felicia Castillo is a second year mechanical engineering student who is part Salvadorian and the first in her family to go to college.
Castillo knew she wanted to study mechanical engineering because she went to the Hawthorne High School of Engineering, but without that background she doesn’t know if she would have been prepared.
“I guess they’re [Latinos] not in this major because there are less complicated ones where you don’t have to think as much,” said Castillo.
She said she thinks the Promotores de STEM program could be successful at CSULB if it educates Latinos about what the majors actually consist of.
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