For underrepresented minorities, bridge programs ease transition to PhD studies

Initiatives to recruit, prepare, or retain underrepresented minorities for PhD degrees in physics are on the rise. Some focus on providing research experience between undergraduate and graduate school; others offer professional and social support to students once they get into graduate school. One of these so-called bridge programs for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans is credited with putting Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on pace to become a top producer of underrepresented minority PhD physicists and astronomers.

Vanderbilt owes that success to a partnership that began six years ago between its physics department and the one at Fisk University, a neighboring HBCU (historically black college and university) institution. “The Fisk–Vanderbilt master’s-to-PhD bridge program uses the master’s degree from Fisk as a way to fast-track students into Vanderbilt’s PhD program,” says the program’s codirector, Vanderbilt astronomy professor Keivan Stassun. It has also doubled the enrollment of Fisk’s physics master’s program and is drawing an increasing number of Hispanic Americans to both schools.

The Fisk–Vanderbilt program is endorsed by the American Physical Society, which has launched its own bridge program “to measurably increase” the number of physics PhDs granted to underrepresented minorities over the next 10 years. The APS program will assist physics departments interested in starting bridge programs or in forming relationships with minority-serving institutions, including HBCUs, which graduate a relatively high share of African American physicists at all degree levels. The society will also “work directly with minority students to provide information on graduate programs, bridge programs, and opportunities to advance their professional career,” says program manager Peter Muhoro.

Talent at the crossroads

Underrepresented minorities account for roughly 30% of the US population, but just 6% of people earning science and engineering doctorates in 2007, according to the October 2010 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. In physics, the disparity is more glaring: According to the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics (AIP, which publishes PHYSICS TODAY), just 13 of the more than 1400 physics PhD degrees obtained at US institutions in 2007 were awarded to Hispanic Americans; another 13 were awarded to African Americans, and almost half of those were from four HBCUs. And from 2001 to 2006 only 6 Native Americans earned physics PhDs.

Skeptics of efforts to increase the PhD pool in science and engineering argue that the job market for researchers and academics is shrinking. But even if it doubled, the number of underrepresented minority physics PhDs produced per year would still be small, notes SRC director Roman Czujko. (For more statistics about minorities in physics, visit http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/minoritytrends.html .)

The message of the report is about more than achieving parity, says NAS committee chair Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). It is about ensuring the nation’s competitiveness and addressing the “low persistence” of science, technology, engineering, and math majors—the phenomenon of STEM students, regardless of ethnicity, dropping out at higher numbers than in other majors. “[Because] more and more noncitizens are earning PhDs in America and returning to their home countries, we need more citizens, of which underrepresented minorities are the fastest-growing [segment], to contribute to our health, energy, intelligence, and defense research efforts,” says Hrabowski. The report also highlights low awareness of STEM careers, lack of academic support, and poor social integration as issues that, if addressed, could increase minority participation in STEM.

The Fisk–Vanderbilt bridge program seeks to do just that. Since 2004, it has expanded to the other physical sciences, the life sciences, engineering, math, and computer science. The program’s directors attribute its high persistence rate—only 3 participants out of 42 have dropped out—to selecting promising students and providing them with mentoring, tutorials in quantum mechanics and other challenging classes, and seminars on such issues as resumé preparation and time management. Faculty members are also exchanged between schools and have access to each other’s research facilities; that’s because the initial NSF and NASA grants were shared, which “blurred the lines between our departments,” says Fisk physics professor Arnold Burger.

Culture shock

Last year, the Fisk–Vanderbilt partnership was extended to Delaware State University, an HBCU that offers a master’s degree in physics and a PhD in optics; the program also produced its first PhD graduate, Stephen Babalola, who is now on the tenure track in materials science at Alabama A&M University. Babalola credits his success so far to the access he had to “the best researchers in the field of radiation detection” at Fisk and Vanderbilt and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he characterized rare-earth crystals for room-temperature radiation detectors. “I chose to work at Alabama A&M, an HBCU, because I wanted to do my part, like [Fisk adviser Arnold Burger] did for me, to mentor as many minority students as I possibly can and to hopefully expose them to the tremendous opportunities I had.”

Exposing prospective minority PhDs to research is the primary goal of Columbia University’s bridge program, which selects a half dozen bachelor’s degree holders each year and matches them with professors to work for up to two years. The bridge participants are not students, but the program allows them to take one course each semester; they also take writing classes and receive GRE test preparation and other guidance on the PhD application process. Columbia astronomy professor Marcel Agüeros, the two-year-old program’s first director, says bridge participants learn nuances about the research culture, such as “when your adviser makes what sounds like a suggestion, it really means you need to do this.”

Three of Columbia’s inaugural bridge participants have gone on to PhD programs in astronomy. Nicholas Hunt-Walker, now at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the time he spent in the bridge program “was definitely worth it. I gained a mountain of research experience, a preview of graduate life, and a taste for the level of work that would be required. I was fortunate to be accepted into every top-level school where I applied.”

Hunt-Walker says he still got hit with culture shock. “Although the people in the department are accepting and friendly, I feel a sense of isolation simply because I’m unfamiliar with the social terrain,” he says. “The culture of the department and of Seattle in general is nothing like what I grew up around in New York.” Conversely, Puerto Rican native Nitza Santiago-Figueroa, who entered the bridge program with Hunt-Walker, says she felt isolated in New York City. Santiago, who recently moved from the Columbia bridge program to the one at Fisk, says the smaller but closer-knit community of Puerto Ricans in Nashville makes her feel like she’s “home again.”

Surrounded by Promise

Other bridge programs focus on retention, often by addressing issues of culture or acceptance. For Native American students pursuing a PhD in the natural sciences, the cultural challenge can mean having to choose between ancient beliefs and modern science’s positions on such subjects as Earth’s origins and astronomy, says Ted Greenwood, program director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. That partnership offers full funding to Native Americans pursuing PhDs in STEM subjects on five US campuses. Faculty members on those campuses need to understand and be willing to accommodate a Native American student who may, for example, “leave campus suddenly to go home to attend the funeral ceremony of a third cousin, even if he has a test the next day,” says Greenwood.

“One of the things people find is that if you have a single minority student in a physics department, that student tends to do most of his or her work alone,” says James Stith, former AIP vice president of physics resources. Stith cites the physics departments at the Georgia Institute of Technology and MIT and the applied physics departments at the University of Michigan and Stanford University as examples of departments that have produced clusters of minority physics PhDs by making it a priority to do so.

Stith also points to UMBC, whose nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program for undergraduates seeks to provide a campus-wide social and academic support system for its awardees, primarily underrepresented minorities intending to pursue a PhD in a STEM subject. In the past five years, more than 40 of the 22-year-old program’s alumni have earned STEM PhDs. At the graduate level, UMBC offers Promise, a regional branch of the NSF-funded Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, which targets minorities but coordinates seminars, guest lectures, and social gatherings for all STEM graduate students.

“I wish there was a Promise when I was in graduate school,” says Elaine Lalanne, a research scientist at UMBC’s Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research and the first African American woman to obtain a PhD in physics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lalanne’s advice to minority students facing challenges in completing their PhD: “Don’t isolate yourself. Seek out support mechanisms, like Promise. Go to conferences. Seek help even on the Internet. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”