The pervasive underrepresentation of racially minoritized students in STEM fields and the workforce remains a concern to the scientific community. At the graduate level, underrepresented students have reported difficulties with advising, negative research group experiences, along with challenges in determining their long-term career interests. STEM intervention programs (SIPs) aid in students’ abilities to be academically successful in graduate school, expose students to career opportunities, and provide them with skills to help them be competitive and successful in those professional roles. This study centers the experiences of 25 racially and ethnically underrepresented graduate students, all of whom participated in a graduate STEM intervention program, to better understand how they gained more clarity about their post-graduate career plans, namely the professoriate. The new information presented in this study offers insights into STEM intervention programs and graduate programs to better support minoritized graduate students in the development of their faculty career clarity.
Burt et al. (Wed,) studied this question.