Analysis Of The Ge Faculty For The Future Program At Bucknell University: Learning From The Past And Improving For The Future

Despite years of encouragement from the GE Faculty for the Future (GE-FFF) program, there has been no increase in the number of female students from our university going on to graduate school and academic careers. GE-FFF was a summer research program designed to pair students with professor-mentors with whom they would conduct research and learn about academic careers. While there was success in filling the program with interested students, it did not appear successful at encouraging women and minority students to go on to academic professions. In this work, we present the results of two surveys on why people do (or do not) go on to academic careers and the work currently ongoing at Bucknell to address the findings. The first survey queried graduates who may or may not have participated in GE-FFF, to discover if the training they had received was important to their decision about which career to pursue. The conclusion of this survey was that there seemed to be positive impressions of the GE-FFF program, but that direct conclusions about students’ failure to pursue academic careers were not possible due to the limited size of the data set. Also, given the large number of choices available to someone starting their career, it seems somewhat unreasonable to ask graduates to state why, exactly, they decided against one career in particular. Therefore a second survey was conducted, and given to people currently employed as professors. In this survey, respondents were asked about life events and preferences which had lead them to their current work. Based on the conclusions of this survey, programming was started or improved at Bucknell to give students access to mentors, information on graduate school, and access to female faculty in an informal setting, all of which were flagged as important factors by respondents from academia.