Creating an industrial work group atmosphere in technology graduate programs: An unexpected impact on minority success in graduate school

Abstract

The interdisciplinary graduate program in Microelectronics-Photonics (microEP) was created at the University of Arkansas in the fall of 1998 to merge traditional graduate research and educational excellence with specific training in operational effectiveness methods, intra and entrepreneurial skills, and teaming and group dynamics practice. The stated goal of this approach was to create a graduate program that emulates the industrial work group environment, with the group objective being that every graduate student achieves the highest academic training of which he or she is capable. In the seven years since the microEP grad program was started, this educational experiment in creating a graduate program centered in a natural work group culture has proven beneficial to its students - and has even been largely adopted by the UA Physics graduate program1. What was not expected is that this natural work group approach also created a graduate community that has acted to bridge minority students from the heavily supportive MSI atmosphere to the generally impersonal atmosphere found in white majority research intensive grad programs. Including the fall 2005 entering microEP Cohort 8 students, one hundred and three students are currently enrolled or graduated. This includes seventeen minority students, a percentage half again as high as the national average of graduating minority PhD students2 and much higher than the current enrollment in the traditional UA science and engineering graduate programs. Two African-American men have completed their PhD microEP degrees, with one joining Virginia Commonwealth University as a tenure track faculty member, and the second currently enrolled in the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical School. In this paper the authors will first discuss methods that have been used to locate students in communities underrepresented in science and engineering that would be well served by the microEP research and educational training. The authors will then discuss their observations on how the natural work group approach to graduate education has unintentionally addressed some of the factors affecting minority student retention3. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2006.