All-Star Cards Highlight Diverse ERC Students and Their Research
To draw the interest of diverse K-12 students, cards highlighted women and men students who conduct research at the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR), an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center (ERC) based at Purdue University.
The “All-Star” cards, each with a woman on one side and a man on the other, introduced young students to the roles of aspiring engineers in research. The cards were designed to attract the participation of under-represented minorities in engineering programs.
The cards were distributed to students attending a Big Brother Big Sisters Discovery Festival, to middle-school girls at an Expanding Your Horizons event, and elsewhere. The cards described the different roles of engineers and described median salaries.
Distributed by the University of New Mexico, a CISTAR partner, the cards included students from different racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. The university plans to produce added cards as recruiting tools that feature students who have graduated from local high schools.
