UW-Madison STEM Posse featured in HHMI Bulletin

PowerPossePractical, and Moral, Support.

STEM Posses are designed to help students with whatever problems they’re facing.

Fransheska Clara, for example, says she leaned on her Posse for support when she missed her family and friends from home. “The others were also struggling with homesickness and transitioning into a new environment,” she says. “It really helped to have them around and to talk about things. I related to them. I knew they felt the exact same way.”

(Read the entire story written by Erin Peterson at http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/winter-2015/power-posse)

For University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomore Caroline Rozado, her Posse was there to help prevent small problems from spiraling into big ones. Rozado had been an accomplished student at her New York City high school, and her extracurricular activities included three years of internships focused on ecogenetic and environmental research. But even so, she was worried about her introductory chemistry class at Wisconsin. “My high school had low funding, so they couldn’t find a chemistry teacher,” she says. “Instead, they had a biology teacher teach chemistry, but even our biology teacher couldn’t get us the information we needed.”

When University of Wisconsin sophomore Caroline Rozado (left) needs support, she can turn to her mentor, Emile Hofacker. Photograph by Kat Schleicher.
When University of Wisconsin sophomore Caroline Rozado (left) needs support, she can turn to her mentor, Emilie Hofacker. Photograph by Kat Schleicher.

It wasn’t just the course material at Wisconsin that seemed daunting: she’d never been in a classroom with 300 students before. “It was nerve wracking,” she says. “Was I supposed to sit in the front? The middle? The back?”

The first couple of weeks of her chemistry class were tough. But her Posse—and her mentor, Emilie Hofacker—had her back. Hofacker, who is assistant director for STEM initiatives at Wisconsin, gave her a pep talk, and an older Posse student gave her tips on how to read the textbook and what problems to focus on. Soon, she and a Posse member from her cohort worked up their courage to go together to office hours with the course’s professor. By the end of the first month, Rozado was on track.

When University of Wisconsin sophomore Caroline Rozado (left) needs support, she can turn to her mentor, Emile Hofacker. Photograph by Kat Schleicher.

The help she needed was simple, but the impact has been profound. “I’m not afraid to ask professors questions anymore, even if they seem really basic,” she says. “Professors actually want to know what we don’t understand, and I just needed to have those first experiences to get to the point where I felt it was okay to talk to them.”

DSC_0288 For Hofacker, helping students have epiphanies like these are central to her work. “Sometimes, students just want to know that it’s going to be okay,” she says. “There will be days when they want to give up, but we’ll help them work through it.”

STEM Posses are helpful to navigate some of the subtler aspects of the social adjustment as well. Bryn Mawr sophomore Carol Bowe says that despite an overwhelmingly positive experience in college, she has had to deal with students who make condescending remarks to her because she’s in a STEM Posse. “Sometimes there’s a stigma,” she says. “There’s an idea of, ‘You’re on a scholarship, and had you not been on a scholarship, you wouldn’t be here.’ People say so many things about money.”

She says her Posse discussed how to handle such issues during their first meetings in Boston, before they arrived on campus. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I’ll just educate them,’ ” Bowe says. “But when you’re standing in front of a person who said something ignorant and you feel really hurt, you might not actually know how to do that.” She says she was relieved to be able to talk to other Posse members to figure out how to navigate the nuances of such conversations.

DSC_0378As Posse STEM students focus on their science studies, they also benefit from two other Posse perks: research opportunities and lab time. Posse STEM students often hear about research opportunities before other students on campus, and some on-campus researchers specifically request to work with Posse STEM students. Even if students don’t pursue research from the outset, they still often rub shoulders with researchers in campus jobs scrubbing beakers in a lab instead of pots and pans in the cafeteria.

“Sometimes, students just want to know that it’s going to be okay. There will be days when they want to give up, but we’ll help them work through it.” — Emilie Hofacker

For students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, that tiny distinction can be critical. “So many students have a notion that science is something where a lone scientist works in the dead of night with no human contact,” says Brandeis’ Epstein. “But these kinds of work experiences help them see that research groups are tight-knit, multi-generational, multi-ethnic communities that support each other. If you wash dishes in a lab, eventually you’ll probably end up doing research in a lab.”

Such was the case for Rozado, who was able to parlay her experience cleaning glassware in the school’s research demonstration lab into work with genetics professor Jerry Yin. She’s helping Yin with a research project studying protein signaling and protein levels in people who have neurodegenerative diseases. “It’s so great to know that researchers are open to students working in their lab with them. They’re patient enough to teach us these protocols, and even if we make mistakes, they’ll help us fix them,” she says. “It’s amazing. It feels like an honor.”

Metrics of Success

The four most recent Posse STEM programs are too new to have significant data come out of them, but the schools’ administrators are already thrilled. F&M’s Porterfield, for example, says that from the three Posse STEM groups currently on campus, not one of the students has dropped out. The oldest cohort, now juniors, has an average GPA that is higher than their non-Posse STEM classmates in a science-heavy curriculum. Meanwhile, Bryn Mawr reports that all but one member of its first STEM Posse have continued on to their second year, with the 10th likely to return for the spring semester. Wisconsin’s Hofacker reports that not only are her school’s Posse STEM students persevering in the sciences, but half are on track to graduate with STEM majors in four years, even though the typical trajectory at the school for such majors can demand an extra semester or two.

DSC_0398Epstein adds that, in some ways, these students are defying expectations. The average math and verbal SAT score for an incoming Brandeis student is 1353; for a Posse STEM student it’s in the mid-1100s. Yet despite that 200-point gap, STEM Posse students, so far, have a four-year graduation rate of 97 percent, compared to the school’s overall average of 86 percent. To Epstein, it’s an indicator that the Posse STEM program is focusing on the right things. “I think we’ve picked people whose abilities are higher than their test scores alone might suggest,” he explains. With the right support, they’re not just persisting in school—they’re succeeding at the highest levels.

STEM Posse students aren’t the only ones benefiting from the program: faculty discussions about the Posse STEM program and teaching science more effectively have spilled over in ways that benefit all students. At Bryn Mawr, for example, the Posse STEM program opened up a larger conversation at the school about supporting students in the STEM fields; the college is currently piloting a course called “Fundamentals of Mathematics for Science and Social Science Students,” which gives students the quantitative skills they’ll need to succeed in introductory science courses. At F&M, administrators have been so pleased with the cohort-mentoring model that they’ve expanded it to six groups of first-generation college students who meet regularly with faculty mentors to bolster their chances of success.

And F&M chemistry professor Ken Hess, who served as a mentor to the first group of Posse STEM students when they arrived on campus in 2012, says his experience with the Posse students has helped him be a better mentor to all of his students. “I’m much more holistic in the way I think about things now,” he says. “I’m far more patient. I’m a better listener. I’m more sensitive to, and appreciative of, the challenges that students bring to the classroom and how that might affect their performance.”

A Path Forward

DSC_0411Because the Posse STEM model so closely follows the wildly successful traditional Posse model, and because early Posse STEM outcomes data seem so promising, it’s not difficult to imagine that its long-term success will be similar. Alumni from traditional Posse cohorts have earned 43 Fulbright scholarships since 2007. And 41 percent of Posse alumni who are two or more years out from graduating have earned a graduate degree or are pursuing a graduate degree.

Posse STEM students are just as ambitious: Caroline Rozado, who plans to pursue majors in neurobiology and communications, says her dream is to be the next Dr. Oz, someone who uses her deep knowledge of science to teach the world how our bodies work. She credits the Posse program for giving her the chance to talk with other bright science students who helped her unlock her passion—and who fuel her relentless drive to succeed. “Those conversations made me realize how happy I am when I can help others learn, but I didn’t know that until I was in Posse. Now I understand why I’m doing this work in science.”

For Fransheska Clara, Posse has given her the one piece of the puzzle she was previously missing: confidence. “I used to be very doubtful and uncertain, but now, I know I can match up with anyone,” she says. “That’s helped me with academics. It’s helped me with everything.”

HHMI Bulletin , Winter 2015, Power to the Posse