By Hannah Gordon
News Editor
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded St. Bonaventure University’s Arts and Sciences Department $600,000 to fund scholarships for new recruits and to improve the department.
The five-year grant will be used to recruit 25 new students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) field, according to Peter Schneible, O.F.M. an assistant professor of biology. The grant will only be available to incoming STEM students in 2015.
“$500,000 of [the grant] is for scholarships,” Schneible said. “Because of the way NSF set up the grant, the only way we could do it was to have a cohort of 25 students come in and follow them for four years, because we have to finish the grant in the time limit they set.”
The department originally applied for the grant in the spring of 2012 but did not receive it on the first application, according to Schneible. Wolfgang Natter, former dean of the arts and sciences, wrote the application with Schneible, the principle investigator for the grant.
“We found out in December [of 2012] that it was not going to be funded, but they encouraged us to reapply,” Schneible said. “So [Natter] and I did a lot of the revisions and resubmitted it, and we found out last summer that they were going to fund it.”
The requirements for recipients are both academic and need-based, Schneible said. The department was able to define the specifics of the requirements, but it had to be within NSF’s guidelines. Students must have an SAT score of 1050 or higher and a high school GPA of at least 89. The department partnered with the office of financial aid to define the need-based requirement to receive a scholarship.
“We used the total cost of attending St. Bonaventure, and we looked at the typical scholarships the university awards,” Schneible said. “We’ll look at which students need help beyond what the university normally will give them, so it’s extra money given to them to get them to come to St. Bonaventure and also to help them not have to work during the school year, so they could concentrate on their studies.”
Scholarships will be between $3,500 and $6,500, according to Schneible. Scholarships will account for $500,000 of the grant. The last $100,000 will be used to support the students and the department in other ways, according to Schneible.
“The purpose of this program is that not only will these students graduate with a degree in a science field, but they will go on to work in a STEM field or go to a graduate program in a STEM field,” Schneible said. “We want to build on the community nature of St. Bonaventure and the feeling from Franciscan tradition, so we called the program Discovery Within Community.”
The program will build on the university’s emphasis on mentoring and engaging students in their environment, according to Schneible.
“We would encourage them to live together in a floor in a residence hall, so that they’d have a closer connection,” Schneible said. “We’d have them develop an even closer tie to their academic advisors in the science departments, who would then meet and spend extra time with them. We would give extra money to the teaching and learning center, so they would have tutors for classes and encourage students also to be tutors for other STEM students when they get to be in their junior or senior year.”
Other plans for Discovery Within Community include mandating a professional development action plan and hosting monthly seminars for STEM students, according to Schneible.
“We want to bring in people from the local STEM industries as well as Bona grads that have gone into the STEM fields,” Schneible said. “Students can make connections on campus and open up the possibility for internships in the STEM industries while they are still students, which might lead to jobs when they graduate.”
