‘Bridge’ Gets OSU Student to Doctorate
By Jacob Longan, Stillwater NewsPress, Okla.
Jul. 24–Cara Cowan Watts has a list of achievements.
She has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in telecommunications management.
She represents District 7 on the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council.
She spent five years as a telecommunications engineer for Wiltel Communications and was a mechanical engineer for Hewlett-Packard for almost two years.
But reached by e-mail, Cowan Watts wrote she would not have had the opportunity to pursue her doctorate — she expects to earn a Ph.D. in biosystems engineering in December — without a program called "Bridge to the Doctorate."
It is an initiative of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation within the National Science Foundation. It pays up to 12 graduate students at participating schools a $30,000 annual stipend plus waivers for tuition, fees and health insurance.
To be eligible, students must have been in the Oklahoma-LSAMP as undergraduates. OK-LSAMP, which pays undergrads a $500 to $,2000 stipend per semester, is open to African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and Pacific Islanders.
The graduate students must also be pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering or math. They will not be allowed to work outside of their requisite obligations assisting the university.
"They are expected to be in the lab," said Kay Porter, Oklahoma State University’s program manager for the OK-LSAMP. "They will have a mentor and certain course requirements. Their job is to be in the lab conducting research."
The idea is to give students incentive to pursue postgraduate degrees rather than accept jobs after obtaining their bachelor’s or master’s. It is also to help them avoid debt.
"This program is designed to get under-represented groups — usually students of color or women — in fields you don’t normally see them," said Dr. Cornell Thomas, OSU’s vice president for institutional diversity and co-principal investigator for the NSF award. "Primarily (we want) to get them into the professorate so they can begin to teach on university campuses. … They know when you have diverse perspectives in the labs identifying different ideas, I think we will have more informed decisions."
OSU was approved for a two-year, $987,000 grant by the program.
The accepted students have five years to earn a Ph.D., including a master’s, if necessary.
This program funds two years.
The university is pursuing another program to cover the additional window of up to three years, but Dr. Gordon Emslie, dean of the Graduate College and co-principal investigator for the NSF award, said the school will take care of the students even if that funding doesn’t come through.
He said students would be given graduate assistantships and the school would add a $10,000 supplement to that for years three and four, which would get the students close to the $30,000 they had the first two years.
The supplement drops to $5,000 on top of the stipend the fifth year as a way to encourage them to graduate before then, he said.
He added, "This is not about money. I (trust) people aren’t doing this to make money (while in graduate school). This is about keeping the wolf away from the door while they are earning their (postgraduate) degree."
Thomas said aside from financial benefits for the students, they also benefit from connections with professors and others who can help them in a lifetime of research.
The school benefits by having graduate students for assistantships and gets recognition when students win awards.
"These individuals may be the ones to solve a lot of the issues in our society — cancer and a lot of other things," Thomas said. "Those individuals could be walking this campus right now."
OSU previously received funding in 2004.
Cowan Watts is one of the 12 in the first group. Of those 12, six have graduate degrees, five are scheduled to graduate by December 2009 and one has withdrawn.
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