FAA Minority Outreach Program 2007
David A. Lange
Abstract
One of the major objectives of CEAT is to educate and train students for airport-related engineering positions with State, Federal, and Private agencies. In addition, the FAA COE program has encouraged outreach to underrepresented minority groups. Since FY2001, CEAT has included a minority outreach program as part of the scope of work. The objective of the minority outreach program is to increase the number of minority students obtaining advanced degrees in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on expertise directly relevant to improving airfield pavement technology. Up to six students every year from FY2001-4 have been involved in summer research at UIUC.
Background
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC has been host to the FAA COE for Airport Technology since 1995. In the intervening years, the CEAT has developed a strong research program involving faculty members with expertise in construction materials, transportation engineering, geotechnical engineering, and structural engineering. The Department is also one of the largest and most respected departments of civil and environmental engineering in the nation. The popular US News and World Report “America’s Best Colleges” currently rank both the undergraduate and graduate programs at #1 in the nation.
The Department currently has 47 faculty members, an undergraduate enrollment of about 480 and a graduate enrollment of about 420. Both the undergraduate enrollments and graduate enrollments include about 7% underrepresented minority students who are US citizens or permanent residents. Interviews with the underrepresented minority graduate students have shown that while such students prefer to attend programs with largely minority populations at the undergraduate level, the top performing students from those programs prefer to come to a nationally recognized top program. There exists an excellent opportunity to attract the best undergraduate students from programs with large minority populations to UIUC for graduate studies in technical areas related to airport technology.
Recruitment Strategy
The Department has made an in-depth study of its past record in admitting and graduating under-represented minority students and of the record of the other 40 civil and environmental engineering programs that have granted, on average, 10 or more degrees (BS, MS, Ph.D.) per year to minority students. The Department has graduated with advanced degrees over 88% of the under-represented minority students that it has admitted for graduate studies. That graduation rate is one of the highest in the nation for under-represented minority civil and environmental engineering students. However, the recruitment success for Hispanic graduate students has been higher than for African-American students apparently because the Department has strong connection to the three universities that graduate the largest numbers of Hispanic BS students. Those universities are University of Puerto Rico, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. The Department intends to build the same strong relationships to the programs graduating the largest number of African-American BS students.
The recent affiliation of CEAT with the O’Hare Modernization Program has also created opportunities for students, and provides unique access to students in the Chicago region at schools such as Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul, Loyola, Roosevelt, and others. These students are being recruited to participate in OMP internships within affiliated private companies, but also the pool of students will be used to identify minority students interested in research internships at UIUC. The FAA support for minority internships will be used to support research internships at UIUC, whereas the OMP support for outreach will support internships at private engineering companies.
Summer Internship Program
Up to six minority students interested in studies relevant to airport technologies (e.g. pavement, wildlife studies) will be matched with a CEAT faculty research project within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC for two months during the summer. Each student will be paid a stipend for living expenses and their travel expenses from their home to UIUC. Care will be taken to find them appropriate accommodations in university dormitories during the summer, social programs will be arranged for them, and each will be teamed with a graduate student as a mentor. The interns will be expected to work on a CEAT research project and to make a presentation on that project at the end of their term. They will also have access to UIUC College of Engineering summer course offerings so that they can obtain an understanding of the manner of instruction at UIUC and the standards to which they will be held if they attended UIUC for graduate studies.
The Student Research Opportunity Program (SROP) which is organized by the Graduate College at the University of Illinois has also been a successful collaboration for the Center to work with quality undergraduate students from under-represented populations at universities across the nation interested in summer internships in civil engineering research. In 2006, a Minority Woman African-American student from Penn State University, a Minority Hispanic-American student from CSUN and two Hispanic-American students from the University of Puerto Rico were placed with CEAT for the summer research internship and worked on a FAA COE funded project. The students were mentored by a CEAT faculty members and graduate students for the research work. The SROP required a final paper and presentation given by the students explaining his or her research experience. The research for two of these interns was based at the Advanced Transportation Research Engineer Lab (ATREL) in Rantoul.
In the summer of 2006, CEAT was also successful in placing a Hispanic-Black student with an FAA sponsored research project for a summer internship. This student was a senior at the Universidad del Valle in Colombia majoring in Materials Engineering, so she was very interested in Civil Engineering research. Her internship was mentored by the CEAT director and graduate students.
For summer of 2008, CEAT is currently recruiting students to fulfill research opportunities for this program. Minority Students will be matched with CEAT faculty within the next few months to begin research at the beginning of the UIUC summer instruction period.