At a glance
As part of the Biomedical Engineering Society at the University of Washington, we founded an annual mentorship program… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2021-2022
- Large
- Awarded
- $5,000
- Funding partners
-
- Student Activities Fee (SAF)
As part of the Biomedical Engineering Society at the University of Washington, we founded an annual mentorship program centered around educational equity. Our mentorship program aims to not only create a mentorship ecosystem throughout the department of engineering and UW College of Engineering, but also aims to make a career in engineering and bioengineering accessible for students of all backgrounds. We hope that by inspiring, supporting, and preparing future students for potential careers in engineering and STEM, we will leave a lasting impact on the future of bioengineering.
We are the Biomedical Engineering Society at the University of Washington, and we are writing to express our desire to obtain the support of the Campus Sustainability Fund to fund our novel mentorship program centered around educational equity. Our mentorship program aims to not only create a mentorship ecosystem centered around underserved and underrepresented communities, but also aims to break the cycle of environmental disparities for underserved students as well. We hope that by inspiring, supporting, and preparing these students for potential careers in engineering and STEM, we will help to make a mark on generational wealth gaps and disparate environmental outcomes.
Joey Liang
Project lead
- joeylia@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student Registered Student Organization (RSO)
William Sham
Team member
- wsham@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student Registered Student Organization (RSO)
Dear CSF Committee,
We are the Biomedical Engineering Society at the University of Washington, and we are writing to express our desire to obtain the support of the Campus Sustainability Fund to fund our novel mentorship program centered around educational equity. Our mentorship program aims to not only create a mentorship ecosystem centered around underserved and underrepresented communities, but also aims to increase awareness of equity issues throughout society.
Sustainable impact
The main goal of our mentorship program is to give prospective first and second-year engineering students, especially those from underrepresented communities, equitable access to opportunities at UW by pairing them with a junior or senior in the bioengineering department. Through our recruitment process, we tabled at large-scale events such as the 1000+ person Engineering Launch and also reached out to identity groups such as the Engineering Dean’s Scholars Program. Programs like these specifically provide academic support to engineering students from low-income neighborhoods, which is the same demographic that our mentorship program aims to support.
Data from Autumn 2021 indicate that within the College of Engineering, women and underrepresented minorities only constitute 30% and 13% respectively of all BS degree recipients, and they only make up 22% and 6% of all PhD degree recipients. Oftentimes, students from these backgrounds are systematically barred from opportunities that prepare and enable them to pursue a career in engineering due to a number of factors. For example, women were traditionally discouraged from a career in STEM because of deeply-rooted gender expectations (Xu, 2017). Underrepresented populations often coincide with socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, and students are subsequently raised in neighborhoods that simply lack the institutions that can provide professional development opportunities. From a pool of 50+ mentee applicants, our committee of four diverse BMES officers across all three bioengineering cohorts hand-picked over 30 mentees hailing from underserved and underrepresented communities. Through this selection process, we not only aimed to increase future representation of these communities in the Department of Bioengineering, but also throughout the College of Engineering as a whole. Through our year-long mentorship program, mentees have biweekly meetings with their paired mentors, and will gain their mentors’ perspectives into engineering major placement, bioengineering research, and extracurricular leadership. These are all areas that have traditionally favored students of higher income strata. Socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to afford and hire private tutors or counselors that support students in their coursework as well as career planning decisions. They also enjoy the privilege of a broader selection of research opportunities to choose from, whether or not they are paid or volunteer-based, whereas their socioeconomically disadvantaged counterparts have to worry about securing an income to sustain themselves and can thus only consider paid opportunities, which are already rare and more competitive to begin with. Therefore, our goal is to provide students of lower income brackets and underserved communities with these same educational enrichment opportunities as their peers free-of-charge and to enhance their careers in bioengineering, competitiveness for research opportunities, and leadership potential in the future. Through these mentorship pairings, we also hope to spread awareness of equity issues such as environmental equity throughout the bioengineering department.
Leadership and student involvement:
The BMES Mentorship Program is completely driven and run by students passionate about enhancing the accessibility of selective engineering majors to underrepresented student bodies. The program is primarily led by the Mentorship Chair, President, and VP of Community Engagement of BMES at UW. The other 14 BMES officers provide assistance accordingly along with professional development, outreach, and wellness programs to our mentors and mentees. We created this program over the summer and have since been involved in driving the program and seeking partnerships with other organizations to broaden the reach and impact of our mentorship program to other departments. As of November, we currently have over 50 mentors and mentees, with over 20 more mentees on our waitlist. Mentors consist of third- and fourth-year undergraduate bioengineering students with diverse academic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds, as well as career aspirations. The mentees consist of first- and second-year undergraduate pre-engineering and pre-major students from similarly diverse backgrounds mentioned above. Our leadership team provides these students with a wide variety of enrichment opportunities by leveraging our network with other BioE-related student organizations such as BioEngage, BioE Justice Equity Diversity Inclusivity (JEDI) Committee, and Bioengineers without Borders. Our faculty advisor, Dr. Wendy Thomas, also helped us tailor our mentor/mentee selection process to specifically reach and serve underrepresented student populations. The JEDI committee that she chairs is also working closely with us to integrate our mentorship program into a larger mentorship ecosystem within the Department of Bioengineering, including monthly informal “Coffee Chats” with bioengineering faculty, industry and research-based mentorship, and graduate student mentorship within the department.
Education, outreach, and behavior change
The mentorship program fulfills both the educational and outreach components through a cohesive combination of discussion prompts and large-scale events. Every month, the BMES and graduate JEDI committee create a monthly list of 10 discussion prompts centered around both educational and equity themes. For example, themes such as “Dead Week December” (finals) and “No-Reply November” (research/internships) these past few months have provided light-hearted guidance for mentors and mentees alike about academic-related topics that are of high priority to them. Simultaneously, themes such as “(Environmental) Justice January” (environmental justice) and “Fairness February” (equity in education) help to build up a more aware and understanding community about current issues in social and environmental sustainability. Through our emphasis on environmental justice, we hope to not only spread awareness, but also allow for mentors and mentees to take direct action for environmental justice by empowering them to make the bioengineering department and other engineering departments more sustainable for future research.
Through the discussion guide that we will be sending out at the beginning of each month, we will include prompts about the dire environmental issues that biomedical research generates; for example, the overreliance on single-use, disposable plastics (such as pipette tips) that are responsible for 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2014 (Urbina, Watts & Reardon, 2015). Besides plastic waste, laboratories also produce infectious, cytotoxic, and radioactive waste that end up in landfills and incinerators, which then contaminate water sources and release heavy metals and other toxic particles into the air (World Health Organization, 2018), which disproportionately impacts minorities and underserved communities. Mentors and mentees will be encouraged to discuss these current issues, brainstorm potential solutions, and connect with leaders on or beyond campus that tackle these issues. Some of the funds will be spent on hiring and paying students who are passionate about environmental issues to create informative and illustrative visual-audio presentations and also compile a database of contacts that students can reach out to should they want to pursue this direction even further. Through these one-on-one discussions between mentors and mentees, we hope to foster an active approach to tackling environmental justice and sustainability within bioengineering and throughout the College of Engineering.
In addition to one-on-one discussions between mentors and mentees, we also plan to use our budget to schedule program-wide guest speaker events for group networking and awareness across participants of our mentorship program. These events will host environmental justice educators and other prominent figures in higher education, and will be held in conjunction with current events such as the BMES/JEDI “Coffee Chat” series focused on informal mentorship with bioengineering faculty members. For example, Dr. Kelly Stevens hosted our November “Coffee Chat” and covered the topics of inclusivity and diversity in our communities. As such, bringing in prominent environmental justice proponents will help to not only supplement this informal networking between mentors, mentees, and experts in the field, but will also spread awareness of current environmental justice initiatives that they can apply their knowledge of bioengineering toward in the near future.
Feasibility and accountability
As part of BMES, we have a diverse team of 17 officers that work together to support initiatives like the BMES Mentorship Program. With the support of this established leadership structure, as well as our affiliation with the national BMES program, we believe that we have the networking necessary to build a diverse and effective coalition of bioengineers for both educational and environmental justice. In addition, our close collaborators in the graduate JEDI committee and meetings with Dr. Wendy Thomas have helped to establish a broader view of our long-term impacts across the university. We meet with the JEDI committee every month, something that helps us with not only our financial outcomes and budgeting goals, but also our goals with growing our program across the College of Engineering as well. We aim to expand this mentorship program to different engineering departments and we believe that our own networks, such as the Engineering Peer Educator Program, the General Studies 199 class, and our close collaboration with the BMES Outreach Program are key cornerstones to this plan.
Similar to our expansion plan, we also believe that our experienced financial team has the capability to manage and organize a budget necessary for this plan. The current Treasurer of BMES at UW works closely with Elizabeth Mounce, the current Fiscal Specialist Supervisor of the UW Bioengineering Department, to track and manage our spending throughout the year. In addition, our current treasurer has held multiple treasurer positions in the past, managing annual budgets of over $400,000 in the past. Combined with the oversight from our faculty and graduate student collaborators, we believe that we will be able to manage funds granted to us both efficiently and responsibly.
References
- Health-care waste. (n.d.). WHO | World Health Organization. Retrieved November 15, 2021, from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/health-care-waste
- Urbina, M., Watts, A. & Reardon, E. Labs should cut plastic waste too. Nature 528, 479 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/528479c
- Xu YJ. Attrition of Women in STEM. Journal of Career Development. 2017;44(1):3-19. doi:10.1177/0894845316633787
Request amount and budget
How the project will react to funding reductions
A 10% cut would be roughly $500 of our requested amount. This would roughly decrease the number of professional development events we would be able to host by half (since the rental cost for an in-person mentorship and professional development event) is often the number we listed or even higher. A 20% cut would be roughly $1000 of our requested amount. This would relegate a large portion of our proposed mentorship meetings to be held over Zoom, as we would not want to force underserved students to pay out of pocket to meet with their mentors. Similarly, we do not want to place this financial burden on mentors, many of which are taking out large loans to fund their own college education. As a result, this decrease in $1000 of our funding would drastically decrease not only the quality of students' mentorship experiences, but would also hinder our mission of breaking the cycle of environmental disparities through mentorship by not providing students with the resources they need in order to be successful in STEM. A drastic 50% cut of $2500 would effectively negate a large portion of our mentorship goals. We would only be able to host minimal professional development opportunities for mentors and mentees alike, and it would be virtually impossible to create meaningful in-person mentorship opportunities for mentors and mentees. This would be extremely detrimental for mentors and mentees alike; mentees would not be able to receive the care, attention, and overall sense of belonging they need from their mentors, and mentors would not have a rewarding experience as a mentor themselves. As such, we strongly urge the CSF committee to support our mission to its fullest potential by providing us with the full funding we need in order to make this mentorship program meaningful for all individuals involved.
Plans for financial longevity
As part of BMES, we have a diverse team of 17 officers that work together to support initiatives like the BMES Mentorship Program. With the support of this established leadership structure, as well as our affiliation with the national BMES program, we believe that we have the networking necessary to build a diverse and effective coalition of bioengineers for both educational and environmental justice. In addition, our close collaborators in the graduate JEDI committee and meetings with Dr. Wendy Thomas have helped to establish a broader view of our long-term impacts across the university. We meet with the JEDI committee every month, something that helps us with not only our financial outcomes and budgeting goals, but also our goals with growing our program across the College of Engineering as well. We aim to expand this mentorship program to different engineering departments and we believe that our own networks, such as the Engineering Peer Educator Program, the General Studies 199 class, and our close collaboration with the BMES Outreach Program are key cornerstones to this plan.
Similar to our expansion plan, we also believe that our experienced financial team has the capability to manage and organize a budget necessary for this plan. The current Treasurer of BMES at UW works closely with Elizabeth Mounce, the current Fiscal Specialist Supervisor of the UW Bioengineering Department, to track and manage our spending throughout the year. In addition, our current treasurer has held multiple treasurer positions in the past, managing annual budgets of over $400,000 in the past. Combined with the oversight from our faculty and graduate student collaborators, we believe that we will be able to manage funds granted to us both efficiently and responsibly.
Problem statement
The main goal of our mentorship program is to give prospective first and second-year engineering students, especially those from underrepresented communities, equitable access to opportunities at UW by pairing them with a junior or senior in the bioengineering department. Through our recruitment process, we tabled at large-scale events such as the 1000+ person Engineering Launch and also reached out to identity groups such as the Engineering Dean's Scholars Program. Programs like these specifically provide academic support to engineering students from low-income neighborhoods, which is the same demographic that our mentorship program aims to support.
Data from Autumn 2021 indicate that within the College of Engineering, women and underrepresented minorities only constitute 30% and 13% respectively of all BS degree recipients, and they only make up 22% and 6% of all PhD degree recipients. Oftentimes, students from these backgrounds are systematically barred from opportunities that prepare and enable them to pursue a career in engineering due to a number of factors. For example, women were traditionally discouraged from a career in STEM because of deeply-rooted gender expectations (Xu, 2017). Underrepresented populations often coincide with socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, and students are subsequently raised in neighborhoods that simply lack the institutions that can provide professional development opportunities. In addition, individuals growing up in lower socioeconomic status (SES) homes are exposed to environmental pollutants at higher rates, including air pollutants (Hajat et al., 2015). As defined by the EPA, these include particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and sulfur dioxide. Given this urgent need to resolve both generational health and environmental disparities, our mentorship program is crucial for the success of future students.
From a pool of 50+ mentee applicants, our committee of four diverse BMES officers across all three bioengineering cohorts hand-picked over 30 mentees hailing from underserved and underrepresented communities. Through this selection process, we not only aimed to increase future representation of these communities in the Department of Bioengineering, but also throughout the College of Engineering as a whole. Through our year-long mentorship program, mentees have biweekly meetings with their paired mentors, and will gain their mentors' perspectives into engineering major placement, bioengineering research, and extracurricular leadership. These are all areas that have traditionally favored students of higher income strata. Socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to afford and hire private tutors or counselors that support students in their coursework as well as career planning decisions. They also enjoy the privilege of a broader selection of research opportunities to choose from, whether or not they are paid or volunteer-based, whereas their socioeconomically disadvantaged counterparts have to worry about securing an income to sustain themselves and can thus only consider paid opportunities, which are already rare and more competitive to begin with. Therefore, our goal is to provide students of lower income brackets and underserved communities with these same educational enrichment opportunities as their peers free-of-charge and to enhance their careers in bioengineering, competitiveness for research opportunities, and leadership potential in the future. Through these mentorship pairings, we also hope to spread awareness of equity issues such as environmental equity throughout the bioengineering department.
While some mentorship programs exist at UW, they are often driven by a niche goal. For example, some mentorship programs are aimed specifically at helping students find research opportunities. While these opportunities are undoubtedly important, they lack the breadth and depth needed to make meaningful impacts on students' lives, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds. As such, our mentorship program aims to take a uniquely broad view of mentorship and aims to support students not just in specific roles, but rather throughout a spectrum of academic, extracurricular, and networking opportunities.
Measure the impacts
Our impacts will be measured by sending out an "exit poll" for students that "graduate" from our mentorship program and go on into engineering. We will use this exit poll by comparing its results with those provided by the UW College of Engineering. The UW College of Engineering placement data is widely accessible and available on its website, and it details the number of students that request placement each year, as well as the number that are accepted into one of their top two engineering major choices. We aim to use a similar system to evaluate the efficacy of our program. We will ask each mentee whether or not they were accepted into one of their top two engineering major choices at the end of the mentorship program. We will then take the percentages of students accepted into their top two engineering majors from both the UW College of Engineering as a whole and from the BMES Mentorship Program. Our hope is that we will see an increase in the number of students that are accepted into one of their top two engineering majors in the program compared to the rest of the College of Engineering. While our goal is a 30% increase in the BMES Mentorship Program compared to the UW College of Engineering, any sizeable increase in acceptance statistics will be encouraging news that our mentorship program is making a meaningful impact on students across UW. This method also ensures that those who enter our program wanting to do one major but quickly find that they change their mind about that specific engineering career are accounted for properly as well.
Education and outreach goals
The mentorship program fulfills both the educational and outreach components through a cohesive combination of discussion prompts and large-scale events. Every month, the BMES and graduate JEDI committee create a monthly list of 8-10 discussion prompts centered around mentorship themes. For example, themes such as "Dead Week December" (finals) and "No-Reply November" (research/internships) these past few months have provided light-hearted guidance for mentors and mentees alike about academic-related topics that are of high priority to them. These themes are also shared with the JEDI committee, who help provide feedback to us in order to make well-rounded, cohesive discussion themes. In addition, the discussion prompts are paired with a set of resources put together by the members of JEDI, BMES, and other groups across campus. For example, "Dead Week December" resources involved valuable study tips from CLUE tutors for the introductory classes, which are some of the classes where this "hidden curriculum" of college can most benefit those with prior experience. Through our mentorship program, we hope to not only encourage diverse classes of future engineers, but we also hope to empower students to shape the bioengineering department and other engineering departments according to their desired outcomes.
Since our goals are to create strong, long-lasting pairings between mentors and mentees, we will pair these "discussion guides" with a monthly activity for them to do together while discussing these prompts. For the current quarter, these events include activities such as learning how to destress with their mentors over bowling in the HUB or career-changing chats over a Starbucks coffee. As mentors and mentees get to know each other better throughout the year, our activities will eventually shift to group professional development opportunities to allow for connections to the rest of the BMES Mentorship Program and industry partners as well. We believe that having memorable discussions and activities is a crucial part of long-lasting mentorship pairings and relationships between peer mentors and mentees.
In addition to one-on-one discussions between mentors and mentees, we also hope to use our budget to schedule program-wide guest speaker events for group networking and awareness across participants of our mentorship program. We will try to host educators and other prominent figures in higher education, and will aim to host these in conjunction with current events such as the BMES/JEDI "Coffee Chat" series focused on informal mentorship with bioengineering faculty members. For example, Dr. Kelly Stevens hosted our November "Coffee Chat" and covered the topics of inclusivity and diversity in our communities. As such, bringing in prominent professional development experts will help to not only supplement this informal networking between mentors, mentees, and experts in the field, but will also help to give individuals the skills they need to be successful in STEM.
Student involvement
The main goal of our mentorship program is to give prospective first and second-year engineering students, especially those from underrepresented communities, equitable access to opportunities at UW by pairing them with a junior or senior in the bioengineering department. Through our recruitment process, we tabled at large-scale events such as the 1000+ person Engineering Launch and also reached out to identity groups such as the Engineering Dean's Scholars Program. Programs like these specifically provide academic support to engineering students from low-income neighborhoods, which is the same demographic that our mentorship program aims to support.
Data from Autumn 2021 indicate that within the College of Engineering, women and underrepresented minorities only constitute 30% and 13% respectively of all BS degree recipients, and they only make up 22% and 6% of all PhD degree recipients. Oftentimes, students from these backgrounds are systematically barred from opportunities that prepare and enable them to pursue a career in engineering due to a number of factors. For example, women were traditionally discouraged from a career in STEM because of deeply-rooted gender expectations (Xu, 2017). Underrepresented populations often coincide with socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, and students are subsequently raised in neighborhoods that simply lack the institutions that can provide professional development opportunities. In addition, individuals growing up in lower socioeconomic status (SES) homes are exposed to toxic pollutants at higher rates, including air pollutants (Hajat et al., 2015). As defined by the EPA, these include particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and sulfur dioxide. Hajat et al. suspect that this impact is likely tied to the locations of homes; specifically, the location of homes from higher SES families is located closer to urban amenities and scenic views that do not have the same health impact that toxic pollutants have on low SES families. Given this urgent need to resolve both generational health and environmental disparities, our mentorship program is crucial for the success of future students.
From a pool of 50+ mentee applicants, our committee of four diverse BMES officers across all three bioengineering cohorts hand-picked over 30 mentees hailing from underserved and underrepresented communities. Through this selection process, we not only aimed to increase future representation of these communities in the Department of Bioengineering, but also throughout the College of Engineering as a whole. Through our year-long mentorship program, mentees have biweekly meetings with their paired mentors, and will gain their mentors' perspectives into engineering major placement, bioengineering research, and extracurricular leadership. These are all areas that have traditionally favored students of higher income strata. Socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to afford and hire private tutors or counselors that support students in their coursework as well as career planning decisions. They also enjoy the privilege of a broader selection of research opportunities to choose from, whether or not they are paid or volunteer-based, whereas their socioeconomically disadvantaged counterparts have to worry about securing an income to sustain themselves and can thus only consider paid opportunities, which are already rare and more competitive to begin with. Therefore, our goal is to provide students of lower income brackets and underserved communities with these same educational enrichment opportunities as their peers free-of-charge and to enhance their careers in bioengineering, competitiveness for research opportunities, and leadership potential in the future. Through these mentorship pairings, we also hope to spread awareness of equity issues such as environmental equity throughout the bioengineering department.
While some mentorship programs exist at UW, they are often driven by a niche goal. For example, some mentorship programs are aimed specifically at helping students find research opportunities. While these opportunities are undoubtedly important, they lack the breadth and depth needed to make meaningful impacts on students' lives, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds. As such, our mentorship program aims to take a uniquely broad view of mentorship and aims to support students not just in specific roles, but rather throughout a spectrum of academic, extracurricular, and networking opportunities. As such, our mentorship program is uniquely suited to make a long-term impact on students' lives.