A program to encourage underrepresented high school students to study STEM through hands-on University-level research experience:its impact, how we did it, and what we learned

Since 2007, we have offered a course that pairs small groups of ninth grade high schoolers from historically underrepresented backgrounds with graduate student researchers from STEM disciplines to complete a five week long summer research project of the graduate students' design. Our course, 'Topics in Current Research', is located at UC Berkeley and administered with the SMASH Academy, a Bay Area non-profit. In this presentation, we detail the structure of the course; discuss lessons learned in its administration; and, present findings from 10 years of data collected from the high school and graduate students showing, among other things, that after participating in the program high schoolers were more likely to feel like they belonged in STEM and more likely to consider it for a career. We hope that this program will serve as a model and motivation for other institutions to do something similar.