Norfolk Women Leaders Association Chapter Meeting: Implementing a Mentorship Program

So, let me introduce myself. Um, I currently, uh, work at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Um, I got my start in STEM education at the University of Georgia, where I majored in chemistry. Uh, yes, I am a big college football fan, but I cannot bring myself to talk about it if you're familiar with the college football um, championship game. So, we'll just leave it at that. Um, so I have worked uh with engineers my entire career. uh started off in industry and then um started at uh Old Dominion University in the 90s. I won't give you an exact um time frame so you won't know how old I am. Um and uh I have always worked with industry liaisoning uh between faculty, students and industry and now at CNU um I'm still working with industry and uh at a department level um placing interns and uh entry- level positions uh with our students. So that's what I'm doing now and uh I will share my screen. Is my screen showing? No, not yet. Okay, now we can see. Okay, great. Um, so I'm really um excited to talk to you about our mentorship program here uh at Christopher Newport University. Um I belong to the department of physics, computer science, and engineering. And for those of you that are not familiar with CNU, I will give a little bit of background on the university as well as uh my department. So uh CNU started as a state institution in 1960, 30 years after uh Old Dominion was start also started by the College of William and Mary. Um, CNU gained independence in 77 and became a university in 92. We uh enroll 5,000 students purposely. We um have a very high uh ratio student to faculty ratio and we do focus on um the undergraduate students. We do not we we offer master's degree programs but there are no PhD um programs here. Um, we do benefit from, uh, the liberal arts part of Christopher Newport. Um, helps our students, our technical students, um, with much better communication skills, writing skills, um, that they benefit from the liberal arts. Um, we have been, uh, classified as a public ivy in the United States. Um, and on July the 1st, we uh have a new president that comes from the Coast Guard Academy, uh, Bill Kelly. And if anybody knows who the former president was, Paul Trible, he really, uh, he was here for 25 years and made this university truly what it is today. So my department um is a very technical department uh under the college of natural sciences and we would like to say engineering but unfortunately engineering is not in the title of the college. Um, and it's great for me to be able to get out and talk to people about our department because it is uh so technical when Christopher Newport is really known for liberal arts education. Um, so our engineering uh program was recognized in the US News and World Report. Um, our engineering programs are AET accredited which is a big deal. Um we have majors in physics, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, cyber security, and information science. Um we also have three physics faculty positions that are a joint appointment with Jefferson Labs. And just to give you an idea of some of the research that our faculty does using undergraduate students, robots and collaborative agents, nuclear physics, gravitational wave astronomy, which I wish I could talk more about because it's really, really cool. Um, and of course everything that's in the news about AI and natural language processing research as well. So, I'm not going to explain this graph except to show you that um 557 was our enrollment in fall of 2020 and then obviously COVID happened, but we are back to the largest number of enrollment at five um what does that say? 89. Um, I've got the lights off in my office because the lighting is so bad here. So, um, we're a growing department. We're one of the fastest growing departments, uh, at Christopher Newport. Um, so women in STEM is a complex issue. Um, I when I was at Old Dominion, I was involved in a program in the mid 2000s called women engineers. That was over 20 years ago. Um and I am sorry to say that um the amount of women going into engineering and technical um majors is nothing much has changed since 20 years ago. Um so you probably are aware that we have a STEM problem in this country and it's not just about uh women it's about the number of students that want to go into a STEM field. um math, most any science uh you go into, you need to have good math skills. And at a at a high school level, uh the United States math scores are not improving where other countries are are improving. Um research shows that uh this is in high school as well. girls and boys achieve uh equally in math and science. There is an exception of spatial skills which I find interesting but spatial skills can be taught. So really there is uh no academic difference between girls and boys, women and men. So at the same skill level, girls will assess their math abilities at as lower than boys. Um, and girls tend to hold themselves to a higher standard because they they are going into a male-dominated field. Um, sound familiar? Um 57% of students that receive a bachelor's degree across our country are female but represent this article says 31%. I'll show you in a graph later. It depends on the degree um but it's significantly less um when majoring in a STEM field. Um, so there's a few things that are important to know. Role models are very important for women and men, but especially in these fields. Um, they need to see, girls need to see women women who look like them in STEM fields. Um, I have a quick personal story. Um, I did major in chemistry. I had uh a mother who was a veterinarian and her sisters who were all in STEM fields. One um in uh aerospace engineering, well, it was aeronautical engineering back then uh and one uh in architecture. I never questioned whether I could be successful in a STEM field because I had those role models. Um so they're very important. Um selfefficacy is also a big part of going into a field like this. It's a little bit different than self-confidence because it is the belief that you can succeed at a task and boys have a higher self-efficacy than girls in math and the sciences. So, it's been reported in the literature that undergraduate students not only wanted role models, but they wanted guidance and support, which leads itself directly into uh a mentorship mindframe that they really um desire back and forth versus just uh a role model that they can identify with. So when a female student reads about other females in science and professional um situations, it it changes their attitude a little bit. Um but what it means is that a longer more f formal program is needed to bring about a career change. Um another fact is mentoring is widely held uh to be the key to increasing STEM perseverance. Um a lot of women coming into a technical major um will uh either leave college or leave the major for something different. So the type of program mentoring program that we have here at CNU is a taskoriented program that focuses on career development and how to best activate a path towards a technical profession. So this graph quickly shows um how the percentages are divided up in STEM areas. And this one that is here that's over 50% is in the biological sciences and all the way to the very lowest um which is mechanical whoops mechanical engineering. Um a lot of the engineering professions are down at this level of the graph. Um the good news is that participation has increased by women but um it's still got a long way to go. So specifically our mentorship program um started in 2016. Um originally we were very closely associated with our sweet student chapter and I'll talk about that a little um later but co significantly affected participation in professional organizations at universities. So um we don't have that close of a relationship right now. Um historically since 2016 we uh have involve uh 20 to 30 professional mentors and or p pay pairs of mentor mentees a year. Um last academic year was a record. We had 39 mentees and 39 mentors um positive growth and we'll get to this year um in a in a few minutes. Um so the kind of things that we do are panel discussions, workshops, um going to uh concerts and the theater uh which happens a lot over here at CNU. Um, and this program has become a signature PCSSE program to help support the continued success of our female students. Um so again the purpose is career guidance uh professional networking uh with um the mentors uh workg group as well as networking that we um organize here on campus. Um it is a taskoriented program with things like resumeé review, mock interviews, evaluating strengths and iding areas that the student wants to improve upon. Um, the benefits it and I didn't write this down, but there are issues being a student and a professional uh, in a maledominated environment. There are uh, biases that these girls experience. Um and uh so the mentorship program helps them experience belonging improving their motivation to stay with this major because they're it's it's a difficult subject matter. Uh and it helps to get to give them confidence in what they're doing in school. Um, it certainly helps to open a lot of doors to new opportunities. Um, all of our mentors, we do the best we can to match them up with a student major, with a mentor that has a similar background, but it's not always possible. So um what we ask all the mentors to do is introduce their mentee to other people that they work with who are for example an electrical engineer or computer scientist um and and be able to network with them as well. Um the uh women mentors are are there to support them as well as help the students to overcome any challenges that they're having. So here's a picture um from a few years back of uh our mentors and mentees. This is at a uh our closing ceremony for the year. We start in end of September and we finish up uh at the at midappril right before uh graduation. Um so this is a graph of our female students in physics, computer science and engineering. Um you see it has uh gone from 2016 from about a little less than 15% up to about 20%. 20% is probably a good um average if you leave out those women in biological sciences. um and 2023 we do not have any data and I'm going to tell you why on the next slide. So, I think everyone is familiar with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and in anticipation of similar laws coming at the state level. Um there is when gender is addressed the registar uh has stopped providing um any information on gender uh and race. Um, so we could not, which is what we usually do, uh, communicate with only the female students. We couldn't do that anymore. Um, so this year we opened up the mentorship program to all of our students. Um, we have 37 mentor mentee pairs this year and we still have a large percentage of female students at 25 and we have 12 um male payers. um we still are, you know, talking about um women's issues and I think that it's great to have um the guys involved because the guys need to understand these issues just as much as um the girls do. So some of the suggestions last year on how do we improve the program um is first I mentioned before doing networking events on campus uh as well as uh detailed suggestions for from the department for one-on-one activities. Um, even our seasoned mentors felt like they needed more uh direction on different things other than reviewing resumeumés and uh doing mock interviews. So, we did that. Um, we are also continuing our uh once semester um workshops. We had one in November on unconscious bias and one that we will have in March uh which talks about imposttor syndrome and um the guys can have imposttor syndrome as well but I think um statistically it's more of a women's issue um when they're in STEM groups. So um I mentioned SUI before and uh if you are an engineer um SUI is a really good uh professional society to be involved with. Um it exists really to empower women um in technology. Um we are in the process of reviving our sweet student chapter. uh as I said before co um really affected uh engagement it's engagement with students is starting to come back but uh even um you know right after co all the faculty here would talk about no one is even coming to office hours um so they're back at office hours they're starting to come back in um uh professional groups. Um so our plans are to attend the Capwick conference being held at UVA. Capwick is uh the Capitol area, so Washington DC capital area women's in computing. Um and we plan to uh meet the professional uh members of SUE locally. um here in Hampton Roads and attend one of their meetings. So in summary, mentorship is a very important part of increasing the percentages of women in STEM and retaining women in STEM. So that is the end of my presentation and I guess I will take any live questions or maybe some from the chatic presentation and yes as a reminder if anybody would like to um if anybody would like to ask a live question if you raise your hand I can unmute you. So I'll start with this first question from Elizabeth and she said how have you collected feedback about this program? So um at the end of each year we do a um uh questionnaire of feedback how what can we improve on? What was the best part of this? Those sort of things. Um this year we actually at our closing ceremony um instead of having a speaker we uh did a brainstorming activity for not in place of the phys the emailed survey but in addition to and we got a lot of good feedback um live from that as well. Um and the two things that we that were most common in the feedback we implemented this year in terms of um the additional um exercises or additional uh areas that the mentee and mentor can work on together. And then the networking um and when it's on campus it's really networking with um our mentors. So, our students will get to know everybody's mentor, not just their own. Well, that's wonderful. Thank you. All right. Do you have time for one more question? Uh, sure. All right. This question came from Kayla and she says, "Can you talk about your personal journey either being mentored or mentoring others and how it's helped you?" She says, "I'm considering being a mentor." Um, so I have not actually officially been a mentor. Believe me, when I came here, I wanted to mentor some of these students and it was like, "No, that you know that that's not going to work for you to be the administrator and a mentor." Um but I have I feel informally over the years um worked with a number of female students and so you know informally I think I've affected um a lot of uh feelings about being a woman in STEM. Um my my journey um the thing that got me interested in chemistry was so I went to a private high school and my mother who was a veterinarian um decided she could teach chemistry at that high school. And so I would watch her on the weekends preparing for class and I knew what she didn't understand or was struggling with. And so when I got into class that's the exact question I would ask her um just to be a bad teenager. Um so and but you know the the point I made earlier that I had these role models that were very close to me. Um I that made all the difference in the world. Um I don't even know what it would feel like to question myself to be able to go into a technical field. Um, I never felt um that anybody was discriminating against me because I was in a technical field. I just and I don't know if they really were and I just didn't recognize it. You know, that's one of the questions I've asked myself a lot. Um but uh I role models are a huge difference and the mentors um that we have here are just they're doing amazing things. Well, that's wonderful to hear. Well, before we move on to NY's presentation, do you have any final thoughts or words of wisdom for all of our viewers today? Um, I like what the question was. I'm considering being a mentor. Um, I I think it's a really important thing if you're in STEM. Um, I mean, any student can use a mentor to their advantage, but especially uh in STEM fields, it makes a big difference. So, consider being Well, thank you so much for your presentation. We really appreciate it. I appreciate you having me. Thank you.