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The purpose of this paper is to identify the needs of engineering graduate women at Penn State and propose a student-led approach to increase their sense of community and belonging. As recent reports indicate, women's enrollment in engineering graduate programs increased by only 4 percent from 2014 to 2019. To increase retention, departments and universities often rely on a professional development driven approach to establish community. While useful, these efforts are misdirected because literature shows that women's isolation and lack of sense of community, rather than lack of career preparedness, contribute to attrition from graduate programs. To best eradicate this isolation and lack of belonging among graduate women in engineering, we took a user-centered approach. Community-led, stakeholder-centric, participatory research is a stakeholder-owned means by which to elicit community member needs. This process translates into strategies that are developed by community members themselves to address those needs. The authors of this paper developed a pilot survey distributed to all graduate students in the College of Engineering to gauge need for community and student interest in creating a Graduate Women in Engineering (GradWIE) group. Results from the survey indicated that students lacked community and had an overwhelming desire to be involved in a graduate women in engineering group. As such, we felt compelled to form an official student organization for the engineering community, GradWIE. GradWIE welcomes people of all gender identities to support the personal and professional well-being of graduate students through peer support, the creation of safe spaces, social events, and diverse resources. In its first year, the organization has sponsored several community-building events, reaching over 150 students across all departments in the college. Through this work, GradWIE seeks to continue supporting graduate students by involving them directly in group and event development, providing a potential example for other universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present lessons learned from a recently established NSF S-STEM program focused on creating pathways to master's degrees for low-income engineering students. This population is particularly interesting, because students from income backgrounds who have earned bachelor's degrees may be eager to enter the engineering workforce. However, in many engineering disciplines, individuals have more earning potential and career trajectory options with a master's degree. In this paper, we identify several categories of barriers and lessons learned to launching an S-STEM focused on graduate students at a large R1 public institution that may be useful to other such programs. These include discussions on recruitment of this specialized population of students into graduate school, especially those from other institutions, can be difficult because i) there are structural and legal barriers to accessing financial information about students to identify low-income students and ii) smaller institutions may not have the student support resources to effectively prepare undergraduate students for future research-based advanced degrees in engineering at large universities. By formalizing the issues facing student-centric graduate education and providing some context for how our program is overcoming these barriers, more stakeholders can be aware of barriers that impede broadening participation in graduate-level engineering education to accelerate progress in similar initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]