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In this age of accelerated technological advances, increasing career specialization and extremely
competitive job opportunities, society has a vested interest in promoting graduate and professional
education as never before. The need for specialized knowledge and the acquisition of professional
credentials place increasingly high demands on all college graduates, yet documented evidence shows
that there exists a disparity in the opportunities for certain populations to gain access to programs
conferring advanced degrees in science, mathematics and engineering (SME). Member institutions
in the alliance spearheaded by Syracuse University with the collaboration of Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Cornell University, and Puerto Rico-Mayaguez called the Central New York to Puerto
Rico-Mayag ez (CNY-PR) are prepared to confront the challenge of making graduate study more
available to reportedly underrepresented populations.
The CNY-PR alliance is based on mutual commitment to research experiences for undergraduate
and graduate students, faculty development programs in an environment where recruitment,
retention and mentoring are essential. The CNY-PR alliance brings valuable experience and
resources for the enhancement of minority graduate education that will contribute to the
diversification of the professoriate. The CNY-PR alliance goal is to use holistic approaches to
substantially increase minority SME Ph.D. degree recipients entering academic positions. The CNY-
PR alliance proposes the following objectives to achieve its goals:
Provide inter-institutional engaging research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students
Review and recommend innovative measures and guidelines for graduate admission criteria
Aggressively recruit and retain excellent minority students to the alliance institutions
Provide multi-year funding package for accepted minority graduate students
Expand professoriate and mentor training programs to alliance institutions
Develop and implement continuous assessment tools to evaluate the alliances objectives
Each component of the program builds on the previous, creating a corridor the student moves
through that motivates, guides, and supports from K-12 to Ph.D. to a successful career in academia
or industry.
The alliance institutions are excited about this program, and have begun laying the groundwork.
External funding from industry is already being sought to ensure the continuous growth of the
program after the NSF contributions have ended. |
Research