Increasing Connections to Fast-Growing STEM Careers
Abstract
Problem: A major challenge to building a STEM workforce is promoting entry, retention, and persistence of undergraduate students, as less than half of college entrants intending to major in a STEM field complete a STEM degree within five years, and less than six percent of non-STEM majors eventually change to a STEM major. Projections indicate that between 400,000 and 2 million STEM positions may be unfilled by 2025. Although mentoring can grow STEM career pipelines by improving retention and diversity of students, it is difficult to scale up mentoring. Solution: Our project will fill this gap by developing and disseminating CareerFair.ai, a web-based portal where: a) students can interact for free with virtual STEM professionals in DoD priority areas; and b) STEM professionals can build their own intelligent mentors. In a prior ONR STEM grant, we developed MentorPal: a machine-learning natural language understanding (NLU) system that can be automatically trained to identify the most appropriate response to an input question by processing video-recorded answers. Our project will scale this up, by developing a self-serve platform for recording and publishing virtual mentors. The result will be a sustainable, expanding virtual career fair where students can talk to a diverse array of professionals to learn about different pathways to STEM careers. Core objectives are: 1) Enabling STEM professionals to build virtual mentors to amplify their mentoring impact; 2) Scaling up virtual mentorship to thousands of college students, especially underserved ones; 3) Conducting a large-scale efficacy study on the impact of virtual mentorship on knowledge and understanding, and level of interest, related to career development in STEM. Impact: CareerFair.ai is the first outreach project to empower outreach stakeholders to create their own AI agents. This represents not just the first such project for STEM outreach, but the first framework for non-specialized authors to build their own AI-driven virtual human. A key impact of this approach is that it can scale up: High-impact mentors will be made available to all students, anywhere, even at home (e.g., web browser, smartphone). Thus, this project will have an immediate impact and build a lasting outreach infrastructure. Direct Impact: Our project will strengthen STEM pipelines through undergraduate institutions that disproportionately educate underserved students (low-income, under-represented minority, or first-generation to attend college), who persist in STEM at lower rates. CareerFair.ai will increase awareness, interest, and career planning strategies for DoD-critical STEM careers (e.g., cybersecurity, AI, biotechnology, quantum computing). Our first site is the largest California State University (CSU) campus, in Fullerton (CSUF), which has 34,812 undergraduate students, of which 70% are underserved. CareerFair.ai outreach there will support a larger, more diverse STEM workforce. CareerFair.ai will be embedded and promoted in multiple centers, starting with the CSUF career center (8,000 unique visitors/year). Moreover, the system will bridge students and STEM professionals by enabling contact with mentors and connecting students to on-site resources (e.g., alumni, career fairs, workshops). Outreach Infrastructure: Higher education STEM pipelines are leaky nationally: students are often unaware of STEM opportunities, and at least 1 million graduates could be added to the STEM workforce if students intending to major in STEM persisted to complete a degree. Successful results at CSUF in Y2 will be leveraged to expand outreach to the broader CSU system (481,210 students; largest US four-year public university system) and members of the California Community Colleges System. Finally, the software will be provided with full government-purpose rights and will be available for sharing STEM and other types of expertise to support DoD training needs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 07, 2021
- Source ID
- HQ00342010019
Entities
People
- Benjamin D Nye
Organizations
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- University of Southern California
- Washington Headquarters Services