The Science of Mentorship

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to The Science of Mentorship. Talent in STEM is equally distributed across all socio-cultural groups, but access and opportunity to pursue those talents are not. Research shows that even if marginalized students earn bachelor's degrees in STEM fields, they're less likely to receive mentoring or be retained in STEM careers. Some faculty in higher education have been working to address this problem for decades. Dr. Michael Summers has been at the forefront. While he doesn't share the same background as many of his students or face the same obstacles that they did, Dr. Summers career came to focus on effective mentoring to support marginalized students on their journeys through the STEM ecosystem, from high school and beyond.
Dr. Summers is a chemistry professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who studies the nuclear magnetic resonance of proteins. He earned his PhD from Emory University in 1984 and was a fellow of the National Institutes of Health from 1984 to 1987 before joining UMBC. He received the Presidential Award for science, mathematics and engineering mentoring in 2000 and was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. Michael Summers didn't immediately know what career path he wanted to pursue.
Dr. Michael Summers (01:43):
I went to a small community college for two years in St. Petersburg near my home. I didn't know what I wanted to do really. I had an organic chemistry teacher who was just spectacular. She saw something in me and was willing to drive me and several of my classmates all the way from St. Petersburg, Florida, to
Pensacola, Florida, which is about a 10 hour drive because she felt they had the best upper two year courses in chemistry in Florida. Can you imagine a community college teacher taking about six of us, spending the weekend at the University of West Florida? And I got really excited. I met the faculty, so I spent two years there. One of their faculty drove me and other students to LSU and Emory and other universities to help us figure out where we wanted to go to graduate school. So I had the best of experiences that you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The interest his undergraduate teachers had in his continuing studies provided the encouragement he needed to go further.
Dr. Michael Summers (02:49):
At Emory, I got excited about nuclear magnetic resonance. Now, my PhD advisor was Luigi Marzilli, this fiery Italian mentor who had very high expectations for all of us. And it was a new experience for me. And that's when I really started to see what my potential was. I had no idea, but I started getting really excited about research. And Lu taught me how to really have high expectations and work hard. And from there, I just decided to do my postdoc at NIH with one of the world's leaders in NMR.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
After his postdoc fellowship, Dr. Summers had to confront a new obstacle to advancing his career. And once again, his relationships with mentors helped him through and led to a life changing opportunity.
Dr. Michael Summers (03:39):
So when I was a postdoc at the NIH, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my career. I really didn't know. So I applied to a couple of industrial positions and several, I think I applied to about 20
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academic positions. And I interviewed for a couple of industrial jobs. And the one that I really liked, I didn't get an offer from them. I also applied to these 20 or 25 academic positions and I didn't even get an interview. And so I was kind of in a place and I remember I called my PhD advisor Lu Marzilli and said, "What do I do?" And he said, "Well, did you apply to UMBC?" And I said, "No." I hadn't even heard of the place. It's only up the road from the NIH, it's maybe 20 miles, 25 miles away. And it turned out that Lu Marzilli had a college roommate who was chair of chemistry.
So he made a phone call for me, they added me as a last minute interview and somehow I got the position. I have to tell you, I wasn't impressed when I visited. And it wasn't the NIH in terms of the resources and so I thought, well, maybe this could be a stepping stone for me. And what happened is I met the person who became the president, Freeman Hrabowski. I think in the end, the most important,
most defining mentor of my life, and my whole career changed at that point.
Freeman, before he became president, invited me to his office. He was a vice-provost at the time. And he just started asking me questions. I don't even remember what they were about. All I know is, that's the first time I'd ever been asked up to the administration building. And I remember walking back to my office saying, what was that about? We talked about almost nothing I thought. But then a few months later, the first young black woman walked into my office and said, "I'd like to work in your lab." And she was one of the very first Meyerhoff Scholars at UMBC. And this is a program that Freeman started. And that's how I first started working with large numbers of minority students and starting, myself, to understand the issues that minorities face in science and education in the US.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Dr. Summers followed his passion for science and UMBC's president, Freeman Hrabowski, led him to a new passion.
Dr. Michael Summers (06:13):
When I started my academic career, my goal wasn't to necessarily be a good mentor or necessarily care about social issues or social justice. I love science. I liked answering big questions. And in terms of being a mentor, I would be lying if I said I did ... went into academics because that's what I knew I wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Even though he never intended to focus on mentoring, Dr. Summers quickly discovered how important mentorship can be for student success.
Dr. Michael Summers (06:45):
Mentoring is a key part of the Meyerhoff Program, and it's a multi-level type of mentoring. And the mentoring starts as an administration level mentoring, where the administration goes out and tries to attract high-achieving high school students who want to be scientists. There are large numbers of them out there. People are shocked when they hear the numbers. Large numbers of high-achieving black kids in this country are starting college with an interest in doing science and we're just not doing a good job of retaining them. So the administration, Freeman, set up this program to bring them to campus, learn about the program and then support them, especially as they're matriculating to UMBC. So they understand what it will take to earn As and to do well in college.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
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As Meyerhoff students move through their first year, mentorship happens at several levels.
Dr. Michael Summers (07:44):
So the first level of mentoring is a staff administration. Some faculty, the second level, which happens after their first semester. So then in their second semester, the students come around, like happened to me, and they say, tell me about your research, and I'd like to work in your lab. And so what happened is these young kids, 17/18 year old kids, started joining research labs like mine and getting involved in research. And for somebody like me, it changes expectations.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
This mentoring was invaluable to the students, but it had an impact far beyond their education, touching people across the campus.
Dr. Michael Summers (08:30):
Now, the Meyerhoff Program got started. I walked into my classroom and 15 minutes before class starts, here are 15 to 25 black students shoulder to shoulder in the front row, sitting there waiting for class to start. Of course, I'm going to start talking to them. We start having these conversations every morning as I'm getting ready to give my lecture. As soon as I start lecturing, their hands are raised, they're asking me tough questions. They typically set the curve in the class. Now, what that does is it changes my expectations. But more than that, it changes the expectations of all the other black kids in the class who aren't Meyerhoff, who are holding down jobs, who don't necessarily have the same preparation or family support. But they see those kids doing well, so they change their expectations of the other minority students. And all these white kids in the class, they see these students in the front row doing well, they end up in their tutorial centers as tutors, and it changed campus culture. The whole climate of the campus changed overnight.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
The Meyerhoff Program has such positive results because it isn't just an academic program, it's for students who love science and who see our communities through a more focused lens.
Dr. Michael Summers (09:53):
So the cohorts' size is now around 60 or 70 students. About 70% of them are minorities. So this isn't just a minority only program, but it is for people who care about inclusion. So typical high-achieving white kid or Asian kid who gets a Meyerhoff offer, probably also has a lot of other scholarship offers. And if they take the Meyerhoff offer, it means that they're willing to do all the other things that are entailed in this program. So it really is self-selective for people who care about science and care about social justice.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
While the program facilitates formal mentoring relationships between faculty and students, it also creates invaluable and sometimes counterintuitive experiences for students to support one another through peer mentoring.
Dr. Michael Summers (10:45):
The students have to take a summer math course for credit. This goes on their transcripts. And so it's typically a calculus class and it's a very intensive class. I mean, they basically cover the whole book in
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eight weeks. And so the students are told to self-organize into groups of four and to study both as individuals and within that group of four. And then on the first quiz, the students take the quiz, they look at each other's grades. The group gets the average grade of the group. And better than that, the entire class gets the grade of the weakest group. So if you've ever taught before, you know that if you tell students to organize into groups and study in groups, the well-prepared students all get together and that leaves those that are less well-prepared in a certain subject on their own. And it doesn't accomplish anything.
And so now what happens is, after that first quiz, the students that made an A are holding up their hands saying, who needs help? And they're allowed to reorganize into a new group. And so now they're trying to pair the weaker students with the stronger students in that subject. And then what happens of course down the road is they learn to look to each other for those that have strengths in different areas. So these are just some examples of the unusual but very powerful tools that Freeman has developed.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Dr. Hrabowski innovations led to better performance in college, but he knew that the program needed data to demonstrate its true impact on the future.
Dr. Michael Summers (12:33):
And people have said to us, well, they would have done well anyway. And one of the other genius things that Freeman did is he tracks the outcomes, not only of our students but also of the students that apply to our program, that wanted to come and they qualify. So we make them an offer and historically a little
less than half will go to the [IVs 00:12:58] rather than come to UMBC. We asked the parents if we can track them. If we make your son or daughter an offer and you turn us down to go somewhere else, we can track your students' academic performance. So we have this database now of students that by every metric would do well, SATs, GPAs, research experience, they go somewhere else.
So it turns out, if they turn us down and go somewhere else, they'll graduate with the same GPA typically. But they're half as likely to be retained in STEM, in science, technology, engineering, and math, and are six times less likely to earn a graduate degree in STEM. So this program is not necessarily affecting their performance in college, but it's having a huge effect on our ability to retain them in the area that they told us they want to pursue.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
The Meyerhoff Program works to retain students at UMBC and STEM fields and careers. And Dr. Summers knows that there are hundreds of schools around the country who could be working for the same goal.
Dr. Michael Summers (14:09):
We're looking for people who are going to be tomorrow's leaders, who are going to end up in academic positions where they can broadly influence a university or a community or other students or other faculty. And so that really is what we're trying to do. And I more and more now go around the country and talk about the Meyerhoff Program and graduate programs want to recruit our students. And my question is, why don't you develop your own talent? And their response has always been, well, we don't have a Freeman. The assumption, and this is a crass way to put it, but what people assume is that if you don't have a charismatic black leader, you can't do this at a white school. And that is an experiment that was just begging to be done. And so several years ago, I went to the leadership at the Howard Hughes
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Medical Institute and said, "Look, we have two major schools that really want to partner with us. I think we would benefit if we did this as a partnership that involved HHMI as well, do you think you would support it?"
And they jumped at it. They said of course they wanted to do it. So we very quickly developed this partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and with Penn state University. Now, these are two places that are very different from UMBC. At UNC, Chapel Hill, they are about half as diverse as UMBC, about half the number of blacks as we do, a percentage of blacks. Penn State in my view was the biggest challenge because they're even less diverse than UNC, very few African-Americans on their campus. And so we were hopeful that we might be able to have some effect there. So we started this partnership and it required both campuses to do a ten-year historical self assessment of outcomes because faculty there were like me, we don't have a problem. I know two or three black kids that have done real well at my classes. Come on, we don't have a problem.
But then when you look at the numbers, it's the same as it is all across the country. Minorities are not retained in science, they don't have historically the same grades and they're not going to graduate school at the same level as white and Asian students. And once they saw the data, the faculty were much more motivated to become involved in these efforts. And then we could show them Meyerhoff data showing that these kinds of activities that we were doing can be successful. They were.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
The program forced the leadership of these universities to rethink their assumptions by looking closely at the data about diversity on their campuses. UMBC's partnership with these two universities helped them implement their own similar programs. Even though the demographics of their student populations were quite different, the outcomes were still striking.
Dr. Michael Summers (17:10):
We have a paper that was published just over a year ago in science that shows that after four years, their outcomes either meet or exceed Meyerhoff outcomes. In fact, their very first cohorts outperform the first Meyerhoff cohorts significantly in terms of academic performance and matriculation to graduate programs and MD/PhD programs.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
The data showed that progress is possible. Academic programs that promote professional development, establish functional peer mentorship, and that are culturally responsive, can work to keep marginalized students engaged in STEM beyond undergraduate education and may have lasting positive effects on campuses. Dr. Summers realized that outside of formal programs, every individual has to do personal work when it comes to confronting biases and leading marginalized students to success.
Dr. Michael Summers (18:05):
People have biases based on their lifetime of experiences. And you can read whatever books you want to read and you can listen to documentaries and you can go to whatever training courses you want to go to. But if your life experiences tell you one thing, I'm sorry, it's hard to change your habits, your expectations, the work you do if that's what it's based on. People like me, you go home at night and you look in the mirror and you say, well, I've got to change my programming. I've been programmed by my life to think a certain way and it's wrong. It's not that these are necessarily bad people or that they want to do bad things, it's that there's a misunderstanding even about the issues that minorities face.
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I had no idea that my black colleagues have to have conversations with their young male children about where to walk and not pulling the hood over your head and all kinds of things that they live their lives sometimes really frightened about. And how things like that can influence their decisions as they're pursuing an academic training
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Dr. Michael Summers continues to confront his own biases and works to understand the personal experiences of his students and colleagues who come from vastly different backgrounds. He knows that he is a part of the solution and strives to create more opportunities for marginalized students to develop and sustain careers in STEM.
Dr. Michael Summers (19:41):
I worry that so many approaches these days start with, you can't make progress unless there's an admission of guilt or there's some sort of blame that you have to confront. Freeman's approach was not that at all. It was, look at all the people around me, I know we all want to have an impact, here's the data that shows there's a problem. Do you want to be part of our solution? And we all raised our hands. There are individuals in this country that have said, I want to lift everybody up and the way we do that is we do it together, and we do that with a scientific approach.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
To learn more about the science of effective mentorship in STEM and for a guide to implementing best practices at your institution, visit nas.edu/mentoring.
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