AfterSchool Academy and Teachers Camp for a Diverse Undergraduate Population

It is our goal to broaden participation in materials research starting from the undergraduate level and we particularly focus on increasing our number of students from all underrepresented groups. We find it challenging to accomplish this goal through traditional recruitment practices, including social media, email, and mail-based approaches. Our hypothesis is that we do not effectively reach our target population or reach them too late when they either have decided against college or for a different major. To mitigate this, we started pursuing a two-pronged approach reaching out to (i) high-school students directly through a newly established AfterSchool Academy and to (ii) high-school teachers by organizing a teacher’s camp every summer, together with the ASM Materials Education Foundation. If successful, we envision to advertise materials research to a population of students that is still considering their college career and a population of high-school teachers that can inform students about materials research much earlier and more efficiently and deeply than mail or online campaigns. Our early success indicators are that participating students and teachers were very excited and engaged in the experimental activities and we envision to turn this into better, more diverse undergraduate enrollment over the next years. In this presentation details about both activities and their implementation from scratch will be discussed.