Christine Nguyen, an associate professor in CEET’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, is part of a core group of NIU professors leading a $2 million initiative to help high-achieving, low-income students in pursuit of a STEM degree.
The National Science Foundation grant builds on a prior NSF grant that helped 49 students in a similar way. This one will support at least 68 students, said Ralph Wheeler, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry who is spearheading the project.
Dubbed Scholarships and Enhanced Mentoring to Promote Equity and Excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, the project begins in January 2025.
For Nguyen, whose parents came from Vietnam, the grant hits close to home. She is the first member of her family to earn a doctoral degree in the U.S. Her parents worked extra shifts to support her and her two brothers to secure a college education.
“I had student loans and worked 15 to 20 hours a week as a student worker for all four years, including summers, to afford textbooks, a laptop, and other course materials,” Nguyen recalled. “Over the years at CEET, I have met many highly talented students that would benefit from a scholarship like this. I’m really excited that this opportunity includes students in CEET.”
Nguyen has been a CEET faculty member for 10 years. During her tenure, she’s been involved in senior design projects as a faculty coach and as an instructor of the course. She has also received industry funding for projects with local companies.
Those experiences were partly what brought her into this project, as she will coordinate the mentoring program and professional development activities.
NIU rates among the nation’s leading institutions of higher education for social mobility, according to national rankings from Wall Street Journal/College Pulse and CollegeNET. Colleges near the top of these rankings take in high proportions of low-income students and excel at improving those students’ graduation rates and their salaries later in life.
Starting in the Fall 2025 semester, NIU’s new STEM project will recruit new community college transfer students or rising juniors who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry/biochemistry, computer science, engineering, geosciences, mathematics, physics or statistics. The focus is to help them graduate and embark on technical careers, with research, internship and mentoring opportunities along the way.
“I thought it was natural to open it up to the engineering students as well,” Wheeler said. “This now covers essentially all the STEM programs at NIU. I know we have lots of fine students in engineering who would benefit from this program.”
To learn more about the project, read the full story in the NIU Newsroom.
