During the Fall of 2006, Jugal Kalita, an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, was awarded a grant of half of a million dollars by the National Science Foundation, for a period of five years. Jugal is also the Principal Investigator of a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a total of $400,000 awarded in late August 2004, for a period of four years. The purpose of the grants is to foster the development of well-qualified US manpower in the areas of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics (CSEM). This is done by awarding scholarships to deserving students so they may:
· spend less time working
· continue to excel in college by focusing on studies
· develop learning, communication, and related skills to become better potential employees, employers, and leaders, and
· develop inter-personal and communication skills by mentoring their peers.
The latest award demographics are as follows:
One of the objectives of Jugal’s team is to build a cohesive core community of scholarship recipients so that other students in the mostly commuter college can coalesce around it, co-constructing formal and informal communities of practice to enhance the overall social and learning environment. To meet this objective, Jugal as the PI, along with the Director of Student Support of the College, meet the students as a group in a monthly meeting to which they invite local industry, community, and academic leaders who give motivational presentations. Scholarship recipients also engage in competitive activities such as design and business plan contests. Each student also takes a leadership post in one of the more than a dozen student organizations in the College. The students also report on their mentoring, coaching, and community activities. The NSF scholarships have been in place at the EAS College for 22 months as of December, 2006. Assuming we have 40 recipients on an average at any time, the total number of hours the scholars have volunteered is at least 11,310 hours.
Over the past three years (2004-2006), the NSF scholarships at UCCS have supported 65 CSEM students, impacting their lives academically, socially, and professionally. Among the scholarship recipients, the retention plus graduation rate is 93.4%. This is considerably higher than the 61% retention rate for the college. The Director of Student Support at the college and Jugal have found internships for many scholarship recipients, and those who have graduated have secured positions in such companies as Intel, Agilent, MITRE, and Verizon. The purpose of the NSF grants that we have been awarded is to increase the number of technical graduates in the US so that this country remain the technology leader in the face of significant global competition. Jugal relishes his role in this thrust for continued technical supremacy for the US.
By Babul Gogoi, New Delhi
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