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UNM’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) is working to provide paid internships for the majority of participating students.
The one-year-old program will have 60 of its 72 participants participate in paid engineering internships with 25 different institutions this summer. Participating institutions include Los Alamos National Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories and Fiore Industries.
Susan Buffington, the UNM School of Engineering internship coordinator, said the internships will increase retention rates of engineering students.
“The purpose of this program is getting students into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors and keeping them there,” Buffington said. “That is what NSF (the National Science Foundation) cares about — it wants to see students in these majors graduating, [so] it is targeted toward students earlier in their program.”
Buffington said the number of available paid internships to STEM students has stayed the same since last summer. The internships are only for undergraduate engineering majors.
Funding for the internships came from a $2 million grant STEP received from the NSF upon the program’s foundation in February 2012, she said.
Buffington said the NSF grant is competitive and only given to a few institutions annually. She said the grant is intended to extend mentorship, conference and internship opportunities to students majoring in STEM fields nationwide.
Buffington said the grant money will be able to pay for up to 75 eight-week internships per year over five years. She said UNM hopes to continue the program with the help of donations after the five-year duration of the grant, and that several companies that hosted student interns last year have already committed to donations to STEP in the future.
“It is an easier sell to companies when we pay for the students’ internships,” she said. “Last summer, over half the students who went out (to intern for companies) were retained and the companies kept them working during the school year.”
Tariq Khraishi, assistant dean of mechanical engineering and the principal investigator for the NSF grant, said the STEP program is beneficial for companies and students alike.
“For students, this is a chance to gain experience with faculty early on in their program,” Khraishi said. “It improves their understanding of their choice of major. Students get excited about their major. Also, internships give them practical understanding of what people in their field do.”
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John McGraw, interim vice president for research, said that there is both national and state interest in investing in STEM majors through programs such as STEP.
“NSF is very interested in being inclusive of all students,” McGraw said. “There are a lot of underrepresented minority students: Hispanic students, women, American Indian students. We are sort of the epitome of what they want to support. They realized everybody is smart, and want to give an opportunity for everybody to be educated.”
McGraw said UNM’s proximity to two national laboratories may have also played a role in receiving the grant. He said while UNM has not heard whether the across-the-board budget cuts due to the sequestration will affect the STEP program, NSF is doing its “darnedest not to affect existing grants, but to honor them.”
Corey Vowell, sophomore nuclear engineering major and participant in the program, said that if the internship was not paid for, he would be unable to participate. A native Montanan, Vowell said being paid is “absolutely necessary” in his situation, or else he would have had to move back home for the summer.
Vowell said the fact that students receive paid internships reflects the essential investment of UNM in STEM education.
“It was only a little over a century ago that we found electrons, and now we have electricity because we know how it works,” Vowell said. “If you think about all of the technological breakthroughs in the past … from architecture to the cars we drive to health, there has been incredible change because of the STEM fields.”
