Empowering Underserved Students in STEM: The Willamette STEM Fellows Program

The Willamette STEM Fellows Program was launched in 2018 with initial funding through the NSF’s S-STEM program. Over the past five years, it has provided comprehensive support to underserved students in the sciences and gained substantial institutional backing. The program provides four years of structured co-curricular supports, including living-learning communities, cohort-specific classes for the first two years, dedicated advising, funded research and leadership positions, and individualized career planning, as well as gap-filling scholarships. One particular focus has been the introduction of “embedded tutors” to help improve student retention through supplemental instruction in classes often perceived as barriers to success in the STEM fields. This model has since been expanded to our lower-division Physics courses, across the entirety of the Chemistry curriculum, and is increasingly being used throughout our institution. Following the graduation of our second cohort of students in Spring 2023 and with our sixth cohort starting in Fall 2023, we present an overview of our successes, challenges that we have encountered, and alterations that we have made to the program over the past 5 years.