SURE: a research-oriented program to increase the number of minority engineering students in graduate schools

In this presentation, the authors summarize a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation Research Careers for Minority Scholars Program (RCMS) at the University of Missouri-Rolla, USA. It was an intensive research and mentoring program to encourage minority students to pursue graduate school and eventually research careers in engineering. The grant was initially awarded in 1994 for a period of 4 years. The program was formalized as the Senior Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) in which each year 10 high achieving minority engineering students worked with faculty members to carry out individual research projects. The authors argue that, with little modification, they believe programs like SURE can be an important key to turning around problems with under-representation of minorities in science and engineering graduate schools.