Engineering Commons^™

People Like Me: Increasing Likelihood Of Success For Underrepresented Minorities In Stem By Providing Realistic And Relatable Role Models, Nir Aish, Philip Asare, Elif Miskioglu

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

Seeing themselves represented in the role models they aspire to, has been shown to be important to students' sense of belonging and success. Underrepresented college students in STEM fields are exposed to only a small set of role models. This set often consist of famous individuals with extraordinary stories (we call these outliers), and represent unfeasible paths to success for a large majority of these students. We aim to remedy this by identifying a set of role models who represent more feasible paths to success (we call these non-outliers) for many underrepresented students. We contend that, despite the less extraordinary …