Nuclear Science Traineeships at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is a Hispanic Serving Institution with a student population of about 25,000 students, of which 83 percent are Hispanic and 49 percent are the first in their families to attend college. The Department of Physics has a rich tradition of training students in nuclear physics locally and mentoring them to take advantage of undergraduate summer research programs at research-intensive institutions. This model has been successful and now two DOE Office of Science traineeship programs, Texas Research Expanding Nuclear Diversity (TREND) and Nuclear Science in Texas to Enhance and Advance Minorities (NuSTEAM), are allowing to formalize and strengthen these pipelines. In this talk we will present results and best-known methods from the pre-traineeship era and will discuss the advantages that formalization brings.