Program overview

Motivated by the success of our previous NSF-funded CSUMS program, the design of the program is informed by evidence-based STEM research, attaining at least seven classic high-impact educational practices. In addition to a comprehensive support system encompassing near-peer mentoring, financial aid, and career enrichment, one main theme of the proposed program is to integrate contextualized computing and data analysis across the STEM disciplines

The program will fund scholarships, up to the students’ unmet financial need but no more than $10,000, to eligible full-time students. To be eligible for ACCOMPLISH, applicants

  • must be U.S. Citizens or Permanent Residents, Nationals, or Refugees,
  • must demonstrate that they are “academically talented“, one way is to have a high school core GPA above 2.8 or be enrolled in a STEM discipline with cumulative GPA of at least 2.8
  • must have demonstrated unmet financial need.  Unmet financial need is calculated in part by the institution’s determination of cost of attendance (COA). Generally, the Financial Aid Office determines unmet need as COA – Expected Family Contribution (EFC) – other grants and scholarships (for the purpose of this program should exclude loans and work).

STEM majors who don’t have any unmet financial need can still apply and be admitted into the ACCOMPLISH program. They will however not be funded.

The current participating STEM departments are: biology, chemistry, computer and information science, mathematics, mechanic engineering, and physics. Once admitted into the program, the students will be strongly encouraged to attend a program seminar, regular meetings with faculty and peer mentors, career events such as alumni visits. They are also expected to learn, via their regular core STEM courses, computer-based problem solving in real-world contexts.

Program objectives:

The ACCOMPLISH program will:

  • develop and adopt a problem-based computing and analysis module in at least one new course each year for every involved STEM academic plan;
  • involve every S-STEM scholar in computation-themed research or consulting for at least one semester;
  • ensure that every scholar has a faculty mentor, a near-peer mentor, and participates in at least one career event per year; and
  • reduce the scholars’ reliance on paid work by half.

Roadmap for the ACCOMPLISH scholars:

Major milestones of the program:

  1. On 08/21/2020, the program was initiated by an NSF grant, see the 09/08 UMassD News.