Engineering student Jennifer Davis knew her grandfather was proud as he looked at her grades, but his praise still stung.
“Good for you,” he said. “Those are man classes.”
Davis, a Colorado State University graduate student, believes cultural sentiments about the roles of women and minorities discourage them from studying math and science. Even within her Latino family, she has had to fight the bias.
Davis is one of 3,340 college students taking part in a statewide program designed to boost the number of students of color in science, technology, engineering and math.
At CSU, men outnumbered women in those disciplines 4,095 to 2,792 last year. There were just 333 Latinos, 60 African-Americans and 27 American Indians out of 6,887 students.
“There is still the persistence of the idea that engineering is for men who are excellent in math and science,” Davis said.
Since the Colorado Alliance for Minority Participation formed in 1996, the number of degrees in those disciplines awarded to minorities has increased from 215 to 398 at the 14 colleges in the alliance.
The coalition, led by CSU, is one of 35 across the nation funded through grants from the National Science Foundation.
The Colorado alliance receives $1 million a year for peer tutoring, faculty mentoring and undergraduate research, director Omnia El-Hakim said.
Davis spent a summer studying farm-water erosion, a project she says inspired her to go to graduate school in environmental engineering.
Samuel Demtsu, a CSU graduate student in physics who is from Ethiopia, receives funding from the program to present his research at national conferences. He also mentors three minority students.
The colleges in the alliance also try to spark interest in science and math in elementary, middle and high schoolers.
Students spend Saturdays or weeks during the summer on college campuses. They build solar systems and bridges, study rocks and learn about genetics.
“Our ultimate goal is to have more underrepresented minority graduates employed in the workforce and working as teachers and role models in the classroom,” El-Hakim said.
Students of color are underrepresented in science and math because of inadequate teaching in grade school and a lack of role models, said A. James Hicks, director of the national alliance.
Support in college makes a huge difference, he said. Students involved in alliance programs across the country are more likely than whites to pursue graduate degrees.
At Fort Lewis College in Durango, where 18 percent of students are American Indians, program coordinator Don May tries to steer those students into science and math.
Many of the students choosing those majors attended summer science camps at Fort Lewis in middle school, May said. And they shared their enthusiasm with siblings and cousins.
“It’s kind of permeating some of those family cultures,” May said. “That’s probably the most encouraging thing. We’re changing the way people think.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
