SEEC Project Underway
Now in its second year, the Student Enrollment and Engagement through Connections (SEEC) project is making good progress toward its ultimate goal of increasing ISU engineering graduates by 122 students per year. A SEEC project Web site has been established to provide an overview. The first SEEC annual report can be found on the site as well as contact information for team members. We encourage you to contact us with your ideas for student engagement.

Teamwork
The SEEC project is driven by five distinct teams, each responsible for attaining specific objectives. An Executive Team comprised of members of each objective team meets regularly to discuss progress and identify crosscutting opportunities.

Learning Village Team: Building a learning village that enhances student connections and creates ISU connections for community college pre-engineering transfer students is the overarching objective of the Learning Village Team. Composed of faculty, staff, and students from DMACC and Iowa State, the team is achieving its objective through establishing activities between DMACC and ISU that include peer mentoring, social networking, and a new engineering orientation course (EGR 100), which is currently in its second semester at the DMACC–Ankeny campus. To further this team’s goal, opportunities for second-year students will be increased as will the offerings for transfer students and other learning community students at ISU. DMACC is also establishing a three-semester linked course sequence in their pre-engineering program to bring more meaningful curricular connections to the pre-engineering students.

Advising Team: ISU and DMACC faculty and advisers serve on the Advising Team. This group’s primary goal is to develop and enhance academic advising and mentoring programs for precollege, community college, and university students. This objective is being achieved through the review, revision, and development of advising resources, professional development for community college advisers and faculty, development of the Engineering Admissions Partnership Program (E-APP) with Iowa’s community colleges, and development of transfer peer mentor and intervention programs.

Networking Team: Identifying and executing recruitment strategies that target academically able or promising math or science high school and community college populations, with an emphasis on recruiting female and underrepresented minority students, is the directive for the Networking Team. The focus of this objective is on programs or strategies that are currently deemed promising but under-developed and assuring that information, communications, and training are gender appropriate, culturally sensitive, and relevant. To carry out their mission, this team is building an informed network of formal and informal educators (including alumni, extension personnel, and community-based programs) to create awareness and interest in engineering as a career option. The team is also providing scholarship and education financing information to enable students’ goals of becoming an engineering student at Iowa State or pre-engineering student at DMACC or their community college of choice!

Curriculum Team: First- and second-year learning experiences are being reviewed and enhanced by the Curriculum Team. Emphasizing relevance, retention, rigor, student success and engagement, and classroom climate, this team addresses student learning at both DMACC and ISU in concert with the Learning Village and Advising Teams. There is an ongoing review of transfer programs of study and courses, including distance education. New opportunities for student professional development, service learning, and undergraduate research are being designed. This team puts the final piece in the puzzle by exciting students about engineering with introductory experiences and successfully starting them on a path toward an engineering degree.

Evaluation Team: Evaluating project effectiveness and improving project activities are the tasks of the Evaluation Team. This requires that the team work closely with the other teams to help ensure that progress continues toward attaining SEEC goals and objectives. The Evaluation Team also reports the accomplishments of SEEC to the National Science Foundation and to the broad community of engineering educators.

E2020 Program to Launch
Beginning in the fall of 2009, new engineering scholarships will be available for incoming first-year and transfer engineering students. A grant provided by the National Science Foundation Scholarships in STEM Program in the amount of $600,000 over five years will fund the new E2020 Program. This program will emphasize student professional development in the areas of leadership, interdisciplinary and systems thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship, and global awareness. It will be patterned after the highly successful Engineering Leadership Program. As part of the program, $525,000 will be applied to four-year, $10,000, need-based scholarships. Watch for more information about this project in future newsletters.

	Andy Smith, Junior, Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering

Connected!
Andrew C. Smith connected to ISU through the Admissions Partnership Program (APP) while he was a student at Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC). Smith credits the APP with making his transfer to ISU a success. “It was a really good experience,” he says. He was especially pleased that the program guided him to take only classes that would transfer to ISU. He also took advantage of the cross-enrollment program by taking ENG 160 and ENG 170 at ISU. “That allowed him to get his feet on the ISU campus and interact with ISU professors and students,” explains Sue Ziegenbusch, academic adviser. Sue serves as Andy’s ISU adviser, and Andy praised both Sue and his DMACC adviser, Rita Davenport, for their roles in guiding him through APP. Ziegenbusch noted Smith’s enthusiasm for APP and connected him with Jacqulyn Baughman, an ISU instructor for the EGR 100 class held at DMACC. She hired Smith to serve as a peer mentor for APP. “He’s pretty stellar,” praises Baughman as she explains that Smith presents information and answers questions about APP and ISU during her class. He speaks from a transfer student’s perspective, therefore Smith really connects with DMACC students who intend to transfer to ISU.

Ahmed Onwona-Agyeman, SEEC Advising Contact, DMACC

When asked about his role on the SEEC Advising Team, Ahmed Onwona-Agyeman responded, “I work with three different groups—DMACC students who choose engineering, ISU and DMACC advisers, and DMACC faculty.” Indeed, Agyeman’s role makes multiple connections. He speaks to pre-engineering students in DMACC’s EGR 100 class about opportunities such as the Career Fair and the Admissions Partnership Program (APP) that can link them to ISU. “Students want to get the most out of Career Fair,” says Agyeman, so he sends them to the DMACC career center. There they can pick up a copy of ISU Learning Village Team member Steve Mickelson’s Career Fair guide for ISU students, practice interviewing skills, and get resume help. Agyeman has helped strengthen ties between ISU and DMACC advisers by moving the location of ISU adviser visits to the same building DMACC advisers occupy. Between appointments with DMACC students, ISU and DMACC advisers can easily spend time getting to know one another. Agyeman also knew that course sequence was an important part of a student’s successful transfer to ISU, so he worked with DMACC faculty to solidify a sequence that transferred to ISU. He also recommended that the ISU College of Engineering Web site’s transfer student section include this sequence. “This makes it easy for DMACC students and advisers to figure out class sequence for the first year.” Thanks to Agyeman’s efforts, these connections between DMACC and ISU will remain strong.