Activities Used in Improving College Retention and Graduation: A Project Focused on Internships, Faculty-Mentoring and Other Career Development Activities

The University of New Mexico (UNM) embarked on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage in activities that are believed to support retention and graduation of STEM students (specifically engineering and computer science students). The project focused on the following activities: internships, faculty-mentoring and other career development activities such as conferences, interacting with industry, financial aid info, resume building workshops, interview skills workshops. The project focused on early career students (mostly sophomores and some freshmen). The methods of this research involved data collection and analysis, surveys, bivariate descriptive statistics with statistical significance, and multivariate logistic regression analysis. The authors have found evidence supporting that such activities have played a positive role in student’s continued retention, eventual graduation and overall self-confidence in their engineering/computing persona going forward. Other higher education institutions are encouraged to pursue similar activities.