Recorded on Monday, June 15, 2026

TRANSCRIPT

Liz Campbell ’92 Good evening everyone. Um, welcome and thank you all so very much for taking time tonight to attend tonight's um, SwatTalk. My name is Elizabeth Campbell and I'm going to be the moderator tonight. Um, I'm a Swarthmore alum, class of 92. I was also a biology major and um, I'm a professor now at Rockefeller University, researching infectious diseases. And I'm also a member of the Swarthmore Alumni Council. So, that's a little bit about me. When I was at Swathmore, actually, my mentor was Amy Vollmer, who was very heavily involved in establishing the program we're going to learn about tonight, the Swarthmore Summer Scholar Program, and she led it for the first seven years. So, this topic has, you know, a special meaning for me. Today's talk is on that program. It's a sophomore summer scholar program or the S3P and it's a program that really strives to fill the gap of inequity in STEM. And I'm not going to tell you much more because Ben will tell you all about that. Our speaker tonight is Ben Geller. I'm so excited to introduce him. He's an associate professor of physics here at Swarthmore. He's a faculty member in physics and the astronomy department and he's been the director of this program now for 5 years. He's also an alum, class of 2001. You know I learned a little bit about Ben; his research is in physics education which I think is amazing because he basically looks at how life science students can learn and engage in physics and it's something I can appreciate as a life science student. He's also launching a new quantitative skill course this fall to help students build the math foundation they need for STEM at Swarthmore. And there were a few things in Ben’s CV that caught my eye as I was looking it over. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge in the UK. He's been teaching the physics for life science course since 2016. And early in his career, this is when it really caught my eye, he spent two years as a volunteer, as a mathematics instructor with the prison university project of San Quinton. So he was tutoring inmates working towards college degrees. And so in addition to his leadership here, you can really truly see that Ben is very committed to expanding access to education throughout, you know, his entire career. As a personal note, two of my daughters have been to Swarthmore. One of them is a current student. And there's nothing like the testament of a student where she's told me firsthand that Ben is one of the most amazing talented lecturers she's come across. He's a true talent for making physics accessible to non-physicists and I never thought she actually enjoyed this course. So, this was yeah, she just volunteered this information. 

So, I'm just going to tell you the format today. Ben is going to have the floor for 30 minutes and then we'll do 30 minutes of questions and answers. If you can you can put your questions in the chat using the question and answer feature at the bottom of the Zoom app. Zoom keeps updating the app, so it might be under the more tab and then you can just start writing the questions whenever you like or at the end of the talk and I'll bring them to Ben's attention at the end of the presentation and then without any more I'll just welcome Ben Geller. Thank you.

Ben Geller ’01 Thank you so much Liz for that very nice introduction and it's always nice to hear that one of my students enjoyed the class. So I'm glad to hear that Emma did. So I'm going to, as Liz said, I'm going to talk for maybe 20-25 minutes. I'm going to share my screen, go through some slides. But then I hope we have plenty of time at the end to talk about any questions you have. Questions I may have for all of you. But I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

So I'm really grateful for this opportunity, any opportunity to talk about the summer scholars program, especially to folks many of whom are alums. Because this is a program that certainly, you know, didn't exist when I was a student. And perhaps there wasn't as much of a need when I was a student, although there was certainly some need. And so, I want to just give you a little bit of an overview of the history of the program, the current state of the program, and sort of where we're going next in the next decade hopefully. I want to start by saying that June, where we are now, is a really interesting moment to be involved in the summer scholar program. So just two or three weeks ago, you know, the students that we worked with in the class of 2026, so they came to campus in the summer of 2022. You know, we've been working with them in various ways for four years, and we saw them graduate just a couple weeks ago. This picture here on the left is, you know, students receiving their Swarthmore summer scholar stoles during commencement weekend. And so that's fresh in our minds, this amazing sort of end to a really long and challenging journey. And then two weeks from now, a little over two weeks from now, we're going to welcome the next cohort of scholars who are going to sign their names to this quilt. As you can see, there's only one spot remaining actually on this quilt. So, one of the jobs of this cohort, this class of 2030 group that joins us in a couple of weeks, will be to sort of think about what we can do next once this quilt is full. But it's really an interesting moment for me when you turn from the end point and then just a couple weeks later you welcome these incoming first year students. 

What I'll do in the next 20 minutes is tell you a little bit about why I think this program is important and is an important part of the ecosystem of support for first generation and low-income students at Swarthmore. I'll say a little bit although not a lot about how we've assessed the program, how it's doing, talk a little bit about what might come next. Is it possible to expand this program in sort of meaningful but thoughtful ways and talk about the support that we're always looking for from anyone in the Swarthmore community, especially alums. So that's the plan. And so let me start with just telling you a little bit about why I think this program is really important and part of a broader ecosystem of support that's really important. 

About a quarter of our admitted students are first in their families to attend college. And this, you know, this wasn't always true at Swarthmore. It is true now. And a vast majority of those students who are first in their family to attend college come from under-resourced high schools and communities. For these students, adjusting to Swarthmore is a challenge along many dimensions. It's not just academic. There are so many dimensions; social, in which the adjustment, the on-ramp into the Swarthmore community can be challenging. And we hear this loud and clearly from the scholars every summer. And then after the summer as they begin to experience Swarthmore, we continue to hear that. I want to highlight specifically that one of the real challenges that we've sort of encountered very clearly when we talk to the scholars who participate in this program relates to mental health. So the class that just graduated, the class of 2026 group, when we talked to them halfway through their first year, already after that first semester, 15 of the 16 had sought help with mental health challenges, mental health struggles during that first semester. So I'm just highlighting this as one example in which this struggle is real. And then it is really important to note that the pandemic exacerbated all of this and we have seen that, I have seen that as an instructor, I've seen that through S3P those who had the fewest resources were disproportionately affected by COVID pandemic and that is still being felt and will probably still be felt for many years to come. So, it's something we see in S3P and we see more generally at Swarthmore.

As an institution a lot has changed since I was a student 25 years ago. But I think it is fair to say that there are ways in which the academic year curriculum, the academic year pedagogy does not yet fully connect with the new reality of who our students are. And I'll just give one example, but it's a really important example. and that is that we have an increasing number of students who come to Swarthmore wanting to major in a STEM field but who are not yet prepared for the first math course that is really required in order to complete those fields. So this is math 15 first semester calculus. This is a course that maybe 15 years ago there was discussion that we wouldn't need to offer this course anymore at Swarthmore because everyone was coming in so well prepared with calculus that maybe this first semester calculus course wasn't even needed. And now hundreds of students are placing into the course and maybe even more importantly from my perspective with S3P, a number of students who want to pursue STEM are not even placing into math 15 and there is no other course that we offer. So Liz mentioned in her introduction that one of the things that's going to happen this coming fall is that we're piloting a quantitative skills course that is designed to sort of support students as they adjust to math at Swarthmore. So I'm focusing on math because it's an important point. Even students who are prepared for calculus, this is something I encounter in my teaching every semester, they are still struggling even if they are comfortable with some aspects of calculus with pre-calculus skills that are absolutely essential for quantitative coursework and even for those who navigate the system really well and are successful with their quantitative courses they can still describe the experience of being in these classrooms as isolating or unsatisfying. So given this reality, the view of the S3P program is that we can help first generation and low-income students be aware of resources on campus that are important for their success, come to hopefully view helping as a normal, not unusual part of taking a class at Swarthmore. And maybe most importantly, we can help these students to feel like they're already part of a a robust community of peers and mentors and faculty and staff when they begin their their Swarthmore journey in the fall. 

Okay, so that's sort of a snapshot of why this program today at Swarthmore is important. Let me tell you specifically what it is, like what does the program consist of? And I'll do that first by telling you how we select the 16 students who participate in the summer scholar program each summer. So the way this works is that our partners in admissions identify on the order of one or 200 admitted students and this number fluctuates who meet the criteria for being invited to S3P. They have to have expressed an interest in a STEM field and they have to meet one or more of the criteria of either being a first-gen in their family to attend college or coming from an under-resourced community or school. A few years ago we were able to look at ethnicity and race. We can't do that anymore. So our criteria are interesting from a first-gen and or under-resourced school or community. Of those couple hundred students who are invited by admissions to apply to the program maybe a third of them will do so. So this is all rough but maybe a third of them sorry we'll matriculate I shouldn't say we'll do so a third of them will metriculate to the college. So we've invited 200 before decisions are made about where these students are going to attend. Maybe a third of them will come to Swarthmore. Of those, maybe a half of those who matriculate to Swarthmore will end up applying to S3P. And then we select the 16 from that group who we think are most likely to benefit from the program who show based on their application and things they write in their essays that this is a program that could be really beneficial. Those 16 students spend a month on campus in the summer. So that happens during the month of July. They receive a stipend for participating. Vast majority of these students would be working to help support their families during the summer. And so for them to participate, it really is important that a stipend be offered. In addition, we provide some technology that will be important not just in the program, but throughout their time at Swarthmore. So they get a tablet, they get a they get a laptop. 

We have two big goals. The first goal is community building. And maybe this is the most important one. When things get challenging at some point over the next four years for these students, they will get challenging at times that are unexpected and times that are expected, we want the students to feel like they have a community of peers of student mentors of faculty and staff and campus partners who know them and care about them and that they can turn to. And so community building is an essential goal of the program and it's one that I think we we do really well at achieving. The other goal is harder and this is the academic preparedness piece. And by this I don't mean that from a content perspective or a skill perspective, S3P has gotten these students to a point where, you know, they're going to go through their first year curriculum with ease. What I mean is that they're prepared to struggle, they're prepared to seek help, to go to office hours, to go to the help sessions led by their peers. And this piece is hard because again part of why it's hard has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Those who had the steepest challenge, you know, it was made even more so during the pandemic and because getting comfortable with what it is to do academics at Swarthmore is not just about content and skills. It's about being comfortable socially, being comfortable with what it is to be a student, to pick a set of courses, to talk to your peers about which courses you should take. All of this social capital kind of stuff that maybe students who come from families and generations of people who've gone to college might be sort of more used to thinking about. 

The curriculum itself during this month that the scholars are on campus involves three courses that are taught by Swarthmore faculty. So a big part of my job as the director is to identify and recruit and sometimes beg faculty to participate in this program. All of whom will tell you it's really rewarding but summers are precious. And so these courses, one in writing, one in math and one in lab science are taught by a Swarthmore faculty. And again, I want to emphasize that the goal here is really not about making sure that students have learned any particular piece of math or any particular lab science skill, but that in all three of these courses that they're taking for that month, they're thinking a lot about how you seek help. So, office hours are required in all of these courses. Resource awareness, like talking constantly about all of the different ways that during the semester they're able to get help when they need it. We give them study hall, which is basically daily study practice. So every evening in the program, the scholars are with each other and with the student mentors doing homework from all their classes, trying to establish a rhythm that's going to be true when they arrive in the fall for how homework works and then getting feedback for the first time in a college course. So, you know, the math course sometimes does and sometimes does not have quizzes because none of these courses are graded. I'm always a big proponent of giving them a quiz. That just gives them the opportunity to get feedback for the first time so that it happens in a setting where the grades don't matter. It's not the semester yet. That's an important part of the academic component of S3P. The faculty are the creative engine for this. So each summer, faculty participate in this program and design curricula that are inspiring and innovative. I mean, it's hard to do a course in a month that can accomplish something. But for just as an example, this coming summer 2026, Katherine Riley is going to be the lab science instructor. She's a chemist. She's going to focus on microplastics and do a little experiment where the students can think about not only the science of microplastics, but how microplastics impact our society. Last summer, Dawn Carone taught lab science. She's a biologist who developed this beautiful unit on HeLa cells, the cells from Henrietta Lacks and that had not only interesting scientific context but also thinking about societal implications of science. And so you know again as I said part of my job is to really recruit faculty to participate in this program. These faculty members not only are the creative engine during the summer but then they become the academic advisers for our scholars during their first two years on campus if not longer. And that's another really important component to have met your academic advisor, develop a real relationship with them during the summer and then that is somebody that you can then turn to as the year begins. 

The curriculum is just one piece of what S3P is about. During that month that the students are on campus, they're doing lab tours to try to meet all sorts of people doing research on campus. This might become a research mentor. This might become somebody you take a class with. There's been an increased focus in the last few years on wellness, making sure that students think about all the different dimensions of wellness, getting sleep, eating, exercise. We do field trips. So, typically in the summer are going to do a field trip to Philadelphia. We're going to go to Franklin Institute, we're going to go to Longwood Gardens. We give them a chance to go to Media to get used to SEPTA. And then they get a chance at various points in the month to meet with partners like career services, financial aid, public safety to sort of just broaden their sense of the resources that exist. They're not going to remember all this, but maybe at some point down the line, they'll think to themselves, I actually met somebody during S3P who might be able to answer my question about financial aid or might be somebody that I can find an internship with through career services. Okay, so that's all happening during this month of July. 

The secret sauce to the program, I firmly believe, and this is my predecessor's Amy Vollmer's phrase, the mentors are the secret sauce. You can as a faculty member tell students as much as you want that seeking help is important and normal. You can emphasize community building as much as you want, but it is nothing like hearing that message from a peer who's just been through this process a year or two earlier. Some of our student mentors were in S3P, some were not, but what they all have in common is that they're Swarthmore students who can speak very directly and very recently to the value of these messages. And so, more than anyone, the student mentors are what make the community building happen. To the extent that we get buy-in around some of the messaging, I think the student mentors are essential to that. And so finding good student mentors is another big piece of what I spend my time worrying about because I think they're so important to the success of the program. So we have six student mentors each summer. Two are associated with each of the three courses that I mentioned, but beyond their association with the course, they're living with the students in the dorm. So they're sort of part RA, part TA. And we've just had amazing mentors every year that make the program possible. 

And then we end at the end of July with a poster session. It's been in the Singer Hall atrium for a number of years now. The goal of the post recession is to give the scholars a chance to share with excitement some of the things they've learned because they're always really excited to do something in the lab science course that they can share with others. But more importantly, it's a chance for the scholars to sort of be welcomed into the broader campus community because this session is open to the campus community at large and beyond the campus community and we usually get a really nice turnout from staff and faculty and fellow students and it's a chance for the scholars to meet people beyond the program. We've had a number of students who've met their future research supervisor at this poster session. The scholars are really nervous about this event. We try to emphasize to them that well and that's part of the goal is to give them a chance to have their first presentation, their first like, public presentation before the year actually starts. But we're also emphasizing it's not really about the content of what you're sharing. It's about getting to meet people. So this is something I'll come back to at the end. This is an event that anybody who's in the area is welcome to attend. 

A month of the summer scholar program is not nearly enough for students who are about to encounter a very fast-moving train that is the Swarthmore semester. And so one of the real sort of points of focus in the years that I've been director is to try to extend throughout the academic year the kinds of support that S3P is trying to offer. I think really important is intrusive mentorship; seeking out conversations, regular meetings with the scholars rather than just when they come to us as mentors with a problem. That's an important aspect that needs to continue through the year. Ongoing quantitative skills support which is part of why this new course will be offered. Regular opportunities for the scholars to come together just in the spirit of maintaining the community that they form social events within and beyond S3P where they can share some of the lessons with S3P with others who didn't participate in the program. And then we come back together for a full week in January prior to the first spring semester to try to revisit the lessons from the summer having had a semester under our belts of actually experiencing Swarthmore, seeing which of the lessons actually are important, which ones maybe didn't feel so important. And now you're about to get grades. You're through the past/fail semester. And it's really interesting to see just in that time span between July and January how much the scholars have already grown, how many of the challenges that they're experiencing or predictable, how many were not. So we get together for that period of time before the spring semester to sort of reestablish the community.

Okay. So very briefly I'll tell you a little bit about how we and our partners in the institutional research office have assessed the 11 years so far of the S3P program. And I'll just give you broad strokes. We're currently undergoing more qualitative assessment where we're interviewing students. I think that's going to be a really important piece for actually saying what is important about S3P. But what I can say based on both quantitative and qualitative data is that the community building piece is really really successful. The scholars do feel like they have formed a community not just with their peers but with the faculty and staff and student mentors who teach in the program. That has helped them persist during the four years that they're at Swarthmore. This is a group that they reliably and routinely say they turn to during difficult moments. And so that piece, I feel really good about, so that's the community building. When it comes to the academic piece, broadly, here's what I can say. When you look at the cohorts that came through prior to the pandemic, the S3P graduation rates were slightly higher than demographically similar comparison groups. That said, there are no demographically similar comparison groups because we are selecting the 16 students who we think would most benefit from this program from among those who are invited. And so any comparison group is not the same as the group that we've selected. Nevertheless, the graduation rates were slightly higher. What was also true prior to the pandemic is that the first year grades tended to be slightly lower among the S3P scholars than those in the comparison groups. Although the scholars remained on track based on a metric of how many science courses they were taking each semester, they remained on track to pursue their degrees at higher rates. Post pandemic, it's much harder to say exactly what's going on. Partly because we've had more students take a year off or leave for a period. We think that the retention weight rates within the natural science and engineering division are now a bit lower than comparison groups, when you look at the S3P scholars. And it's still definitely true that the scholars' first year grades are a bit lower than those in the quote unquote comparison groups, which again are not directly comparative. I will say that the retention rate thing in NSE is not something that I'm super super worried about. And that's because one of the things that is very clear when you work with these cohorts every year is that Swarthmore exposes these students to lots of things outside of the natural science division that they're really excited about and they didn't know about. And if a student gets really excited about a major outside of science, I don't see that as a failure. Even though part of the goal of the program is to support students in pursuing STEM degrees, I think that means we are still helping that student to find their home at Swarthmore. And really importantly, what we have been able to sort of measure in sort of quantitative ways is that office hour visits, use of the writing center, those things are demonstrably higher among scholars than other students. And that's really important to me because I think that that's the most important academic piece that we're trying to teach, the helpseeking piece. So I'm happy to say more if there are questions about assessment. I will say my own personal view and as Liz mentioned, my research focus is education research. I do a lot of qualitative research. I'm unconvinced that the grades and the retention rates are telling the story as much as some of the qualitative stories about even though I'm struggling, I feel like I have a home in a community. Even though I'm struggling, I don't feel alienated. That's what it would be hard to measure just looking at the numbers. 

And so lastly before we open it up what comes next as we sort of move forward into the next decade of S3P? Well we are now returning to a fully residential program. There were years post pandemic where part of the program was on Zoom. As I mentioned there's a lot more academic year programming. This has all been spearheaded by our incredible assistant director Kyra Harvey-Broughton who joined the program three and a half years ago I think. And has helped to provide a ton of support during the academic year including meeting with students regularly if they want to providing weekly social opportunities for the scholars providing opportunities for the scholars to connect with alumni networks and now we have enough S3P alumni who've gone through S3P that that's an especially useful sort of network for the scholars to meet trying to find ways to partner with the first-gen low-income office in general and really focusing on reimagining the me the student mentor experience to have a greater focus on inclusive pedagogy, developing a big-sib, little-sib program. These are some things that I bring from my background in education research. 

I would like to see there be more than 16 students. One of the things that was always true was that 16 was meant to be a pilot number. The goal was to have a program that started at 16 and now we've been there for 11 years and expand. And I would like to see that expansion and I would like to see the students who participate come from beyond the natural science division. Students who are pursuing social sciences, humanities certainly would benefit from S3P. What I would say is that I think this requires a number of things. It requires a commitment from college leadership that this is in fact a priority and S3P is well resourced, it's an endowed program. We spend a lot of money on a variety of things. But if we want the experience to still remain small and we want the experience to still remain really close mentorship between faculty, staff and students, we would need more money to support additional scholars because we need to pay more people, more mentors, more faculty. Otherwise, the program just increases in terms of the number of students. But we lose the sort of small field that I think is really important for the success of S3P. And then we need faculty to champion this cause in the divisions other than the natural sciences so that we can get faculty participation there. So that's what it requires. I don't think this necessarily requires a huge reimagining of the whole program. If this is what the current sort of structure of classes looks like during that month of July, you could imagine that for a student interested in the social sciences, you could just replace the lab science course with a social science course. You could replace the math course with a more stat focused math course. There are ways in which we can build off of the existing structure to expand and reach more students. If you're interested in ways that you potentially as an alum or a member of the Swarthmore community generally can help S3P, we are constantly looking for people to be mentors and that can mean a variety of things. But mentorship in general is something that the scholars need and want. We always have alumni panels that come and talk to the scholars at various points both during the summer and during January week about a variety of careers, variety of experiences that people have had after Swarthmore. If you're in the area and you want to come to the poster session in person at the end of July, that's always really valuable because a good turnout at that session is really important. And then just spreading the word about the program to various networks you might be a part of. All of that is super critical because the scholars do feel that. they feel like, oh, is this a program that people know about? Is this a program where there's more support than just the people in the room during July? Does the campus community know about this beyond the campus community? Is this something that people are aware of? 

And I'd be really interested, I'm going to stop there, and I'd be really interested as we go to the Q&A for the last half hour, not just and I'm happy to answer any questions you have, but if anybody has ideas about ways that S3P can draw on people who are not currently at Swarthmore, but are connected to the college, I would love to hear those ideas because I think that the the more connections we can form in that way, the better. Okay, so thank you all for your attention during that rather long overview. I'm going to be happy to answer any questions. 

Liz Campbell ’92 All right. Thank you so much, Ben. That was really amazing to hear about. I'll just remind people if you can add your affiliation or your year to your identity when you ask a question. That would be great, but I know we already have a few here, so I'll just start with those. So Ben, Kip Davis asks two questions as has the diversity of the program changed or how does it change from year to year and how’s the government you know the recent governmental changes impacted the diversity you've seen over the years? 

Ben Geller ’01 Did you say there was a second question or? 

Liz Campbell ’92 Yeah, it's not really related so maybe I'll save it for the. 

Ben Geller ’01 So it's still hard to say how the diversity of the program has evolved in light of A: the Supreme Court decision that made it not allowable to use race as a criteria for selection in the program. But not just that, there are other factors. Well, most recently, not only can we not use race and ethnicity, but in this past year, we can't use what's called landscape scores, which give us a really nice measure, admissions uses them to get a nice measure of the resource level of a particular community, a particular school. We don't have that anymore to use either. And I will also add to this mix and this is standardized tests. We do not have standard standardized test scores. Which you can have a variety of opinions about whether we should have standardized test scores. And maybe we should not at the point of admissions, but what I can tell you is that math SAT scores are remarkably predictive for need. And so there's a lot of things we don't have anymore. What I can say is that in the years that we've been selecting the scholars post being able to use race, race and ethnicity, we haven't seen a dramatic shift in the makeup of the group. But 16 is a small enough number that fluctuations can be, like one or two can be really significant. So we are still getting a group that looks very similar to the group looked 5 years ago. I think we are certainly still getting almost entirely first-gen and under-resourced students. I think on a year-to-year basis, there's just a statistical fluctuation when you have 16 students about, you know, how many Hispanic students, how many black students we might have. I'm pretty confident that because admissions is amazing, we are still identifying the right students, like we are still inviting the right students, we are still selecting the right students. What I also think is that when you look at the pool of 30 or 40 applicants to the program, almost all of them would really benefit. And so we're splitting hairs when we select the 16, we're using what we can to make the best guess as to which 16 are going to most benefit. But really, if we expanded to 32 without going beyond the natural science division, so just 32 NSE interested students, I think we would get a really good group that would look very similar to the 16 that we have. So the short answer to Kip's question is that I don't think the diversity has changed dramatically in the lifespan of the program despite sort of a much more limited set of data to use. And that's partly because admissions does a really really good job of going through student by student and inviting the ones who should be invited to the program. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Okay. Thank you. John Halbert, class of 89, noted that Swarthmore used to do this with Bryn Mawr and Haverford. Is that something that's still happening or I guess or did happen? 

Ben Geller ’01 I don't know if there was, so I'm not aware of a program that happened like a residential month-long program in the summer. And certainly there is no longer an official affiliation with Bryn Mawr and Haverford. There's a variety of other pre-orientation programs at Swarthmore and at the other TriCo colleges that try to do similar things. I think the thing that is and and it it very well could have happened before, you know, that I'm not aware of it. But I think what's unique about S3P or maybe not unique but really different is how many resources go into this. The reason the program is expensive is that housing students and feeding students and getting them to travel to and from campus for this month and then making sure that you incentivize the faculty and mentors to participate by providing stipends makes it a very expensive program and a very intensive experience. One of the things that the scholars will say every year at the end of the month is that it was really really intense. And you know, part of that's by design because we want them to sort of begin to experience what an academic semester can feel like, but it's also intense because living with each other in community for a month is a very intense experience. And so, I think that's what's unique about the program in comparison to shorter pre-orientation programs that might not be a fully sort of immersive academic experience. 

Liz Campbell ’92 I'm just going to ask a question from myself. Do you find that the underresourced students struggle more in the STEM than the other areas of in at Swarthmore and other majors?

Ben Geller ’01 I don't think so. I think there are some unique challenges to STEM which revolve around quantitative skills and that is an area in which there's a there's a key component that needs to be addressed. But I do think that if you talk to folks who teach students in ways that that involve intensive writing you see very similar sort of concerns and that's why the course the the curriculum includes a writing course not you know these are potential STEM students but we think it's really important that they work on writing during the program. I think the reason I say I don't think that it's a STEM specific thing is because the issues that we're trying to support students with are not content and skills alone. They are the adjustment to college life in a community where so many of your peers are going to be from really really privileged backgrounds and for the first time you're encountering those kinds of people. Understanding what college is, understand like, what I see this a lot when I'm advising students as an academic adviser, S3P students, just like what is it like to select four courses and why four courses? Shouldn't I be able to do seven or eight? And these things are not specific to STEM, they're just not specific to science. So, I think that the challenge is about acclimating to college life generally. That said, when you put on top of that this piece related to quantitative skills that has just gotten more and more challenging over the years, I think there is an added challenge that and let's put it this way that that added challenge comes up really early like in your first semester that quantitative skills piece is going to be a real real challenge. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Okay, thank you. Another question that's coming from Charles Grawa, class of 2025. They are a pre-doctoral researcher now and they'll be starting your PhD soon and what resources are available for them to teach and fill the gaps for S3P. They're asking for ways that they can actually help in this program. Their field is in economics, but they they gravitate towards more quantitative courses within economics. 

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah, I really appreciate the question. You know, one of the most useful moments of the program is when we have these panels with recent alums who can speak in the very recent past, not just from 20 years ago, but in the last couple years about their experience at Swarthmore. And this doesn't have to be students who themselves are FLI students, although it's usually helpful if they are. But just being able to speak to the scholars about your own struggle, your own experience with needing to seek help, needing to go to office hours. I think the more often that the scholars hear that from recent alums and so the direct answer to the question is like volunteering for alumni panels coming to the poster session if you're nearby, giving the scholars this the sense that that the struggle that we're talking about with them that the help seeking the struggle this is not specific to them and that almost everyone who has experienced Swarthmore has experienced this in one way or another I think is really really valuable. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Thank you. And there's another question here from Becky Voorhees. She's saying I'm assuming alumni mentors should be in a science field. I'm I think we know the answer right now. Are you aware of the reasons why candidates for S3P choose not to participate? So two questions. 

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah. So actually on the first question about whether alumni mentors need to be in science. No, I actually don't think so. And part of the reason is that as I sort of alluded to a number of our scholars are leaving STEM and not for bad reasons necessarily because they have some other interest they find some other passion. I think it's actually really great for the scholars to hear from alums in a really wide range of fields beyond science. So that's the first part of the question. Another really good question is about who's not choosing to participate and it's really hard to know. I will say like u the timing of this program is tricky, right? So like you're invited to apply um and the deadline for your application to S3P is mid-May and then you hear like 10 days later whether you've been accepted and then if you are accepted you come to campus a few weeks later. So I think for a lot of people the practicalities of like all of a sudden losing that last summer that you thought you would have near your family, that can be a little bit overwhelming. So I think some people just want to remain close to home for that last summer before they start college. We have heard from students who feel like their parents, their families are really relying on them and as I said we try to provide a stipend to help support the families who would otherwise be relying on these students to work during that summer. But I think even with that stipend, it's still the case that some people feel like they've made a commitment to stay near home and work near home for that last summer. And then you know people go on, I guess what I'm saying is people have already made plans for July by the time May comes and so it may not work for people's schedule to to spend a month. I'm actually really impressed that we get about half of the invited matriculating students to apply. I think that's really good. It shows that the program is seen as valuable. But it is an interesting question why not every student applies. 

Liz Campbell ’92 So Ben you'll see from the next question that a lot of people that are attending the panel are really interested in volunteering. The next question comes from Ahmad Mosadakur Ramand and they're asking, from an FLI parent ambassador. What supportive roles can an FLI parent engage in for S3P students? And the reason I said as you can see a lot of people are very interested in helping out. Maybe you can also note where or who they can contact or you know, if there's a signup sheet somewhere we can all fill.

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah, that's great. I mean we so anybody certainly who's attending this should feel free to reach out directly to me and u if you're offering in any capacity to sort of serve as a panelist an alumni panelist or a mentor or even just somebody who you the scholars could reach out to about advice I would you know create that list and and we'd have it. The process of seeking out people to participate in these events has been tricky. We work with Career Services, we work with a number of campus partners to try to invite FLI alums who may be in a variety of fields to interact with the scholars. I would say that contacting the program directly, so that could be me, that could be Kyra Harvey-Broughton to offer any of these things would be really welcome. There's a lot of announcements that go out to the campus community around the poster session, around a variety of things that happened during January week that if any of you in the audience have ideas for how those announcements could reach beyond the campus in effective ways. You know, this is something that I talked about with the alumni council last fall, like reaching out to networks that we're not currently reaching. I would welcome those ways for us to sort of broadcast our needs. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Wonderful. Thank you. I love this next question from Steven Mink, class of 77. So how might the expansion proceed incrementally by a participant or two or strategically in your ideas and how might a 50th reunion class gift contribute to individual participant stipend endowment growth faculty involvement. I guess they're asking for, you know, the logistic details on how or what would you want and how might they help? 

Ben Geller ’01 Well thank you for that question. I appreciate it. 

Liz Campbell ’92 I hope I interpret that correctly. [laughs] 

Ben Geller ’01 Sorry, I got lost in the second part. What was the first part? 

Liz Campbell ’92  Yeah. So, the first part is what do you think, how do you think the expansion could proceed? And then, you know, they offer ideas of how as an alum they might be able to help with a class kit, for example. 

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah. I mean, so Advancement has a number of funds that are specific to S3P that we'd welcome donations to. To answer the question about how expansion might proceed. I think we could starting next year we could expand without any additional resources and I say that because we're already very well resourced in the sense that we have a lot of mentors a lot of faculty involved and so it wouldn't be crazy for the same number of of faculty, staff and mentors to support 32 students instead of 16. That said, I do think that the closeness of the community would suffer, but I think more importantly, when the academic year begins, it would be much harder to maintain this sort of intrusive mentoring. Right now, what makes that possible is that we have a relatively small number of advises associated with each of the faculty mentors during the year. And that's really crucial for sort of supporting these 16 students closely. So, we could expand. So my thought for sort of incremental steps, which is exactly how I'm thinking about it. I'd like to as a test case and I know one of the previous questions was from someone in economics. I think a test case is to at least go to students who are interested in economics, which is a large number of students. This is an area that obviously requires quantitative skills and so there's already some overlap and so maybe like in the first year we go from 16 to 20 or 24 where those other four or eight students have expressed an interest in either econ or some social science related to that. Just to see if expanding to 20 or 24 changes things in ways that we're not predicting. Longer term I do think that we do need more money to make this happen. And I think that if a class wants to contribute as a class that was as was alluded to in the question or if an individual wants to contribute, if you contact advancement there are specific funds that are already specifically set up for S3P and of course that would be very welcome. I will say that the money that was raised to make this an endowed program was raised by my predecessor by and large, Amy Vollmer, who talks a lot about how how easy in some ways the fundraising is for this program because there was so much support to contribute and and I think that would still be the case. So, I'm optimistic that if that's what we want to do, we can do it. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Thank you. So this is a question from Jim Sailor class of 90 and you know he'd like to know if there are other selective schools for example Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan that have a similar, they note similar experiences and what their responses are and related to that question John Halbert noted that there's a program called the predecessor program that was identical to this almost identical to this one and that was at Haverford so at least one school may have a similar program. 

Ben Geller ’01 No, that's great. There are a lot of analogous programs at our peer institutions. Many of the programs that I'm aware of are partly virtual. It's very expensive to bring people to campus for this length of time. And so a lot of the programs that I'm aware of at peer institutions are either partially or fully virtual experiences or they're much shorter and focus maybe in just a few days right before orientation for example on the issues which are very important issues around messaging around helpseeking and all of these things but they don't involve the actual academic component of taking classes. I'm not aware of any other program among our peer institutions that involves specifically a month-long academic immersion. The programs that I am familiar with are often bigger than 16 because they have this more virtual or you know less well-resourced programs and so I do frankly sometimes wonder like, should we expand to reach more people even if it means changing, you know, the features of the program. But I think that what my peers that I've talked to have said is that when they hear about what we're able to offer they all say we wish we could offer that. When I say it's only for 16 students, you know, they say, well, it's still really really good for those 16 students. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Yeah. I agree. So Karen Oland, she/her asks class of 83, is there a social media group such as LinkedIn, Facebook where one can find information on an ongoing basis for the days of the events you mentioned for example you know the poster sessions?

Ben Geller ’01 That's a great idea. We don't have a social media presence for S3P specifically. We have a website where at the times where we're leading up to things, things will get posted, but I really like that idea. So that's something that we can do. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Okay. And, Gavin Wright asked if you can note, I think you might have partially addressed this already, where most of the S3P students come from? Maybe backgrounds or?

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah. I mean yeah so you know geographically where the students come from. So we currently only accept domestic students for a variety of logistical reasons for the most part around that. You know we have a number of students from, this is to Kip's question a few minutes ago, one of the things that I've seen slightly increasing over time is the number of rural students who are participating in S3P. So that possibly is related to Kip's question about changes that might have resulted from which data we do and do not have access to, but besides the rural students we always have out of the 16 maybe three or four who come from very rural communities. Most of the students come from, you know ,big cities. We get a number of students from Philadelphia, from Houston, from Los Angeles, from New York. So between those you know those big cities and some of the very rural areas which are very under resourced that comprises the vast majority of the 16 most of these students who participate have had limited exposure to AP courses, limited exposure to certainly advanced math courses and so and of course we're selecting for students who probably had the least math background. And I think that almost 100% of the students come from if we had these landscape scores that we used to have, come from communities and neighborhoods and schools that are the least resourced in the country. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Okay. So yeah. Kip, I think it's Kip Davis who also mentioned does restricting the participating faculty to those with tenure kind of impedes your expansion? 

Ben Geller ’01 Yes it does. Sorry that this is a tricky one. And so when I when I first became director, I sort of really really wanted to not make having tenure a requirement. But as anyone who's in academia knows, this is a complicated one because the worry is that if not non and the reason that I wanted to do this is that some of our most enthusiastic amazing people for this program are either pre-tenured or not tenure track and of course the challenge is that you know pre-tenure faculty need to need to publish stuff, they need to do research and so there's this concern that participating in S3P might take away from that. So the short answer is that there is no anymore there's no actual requirement that you be tenured in order to to teach in the program but that in practice individual departments are strongly recommending to their faculty that they wait until their tenure to participate in the program because their concerns are about you know spending time on things like this before before tenure. The solution that I would love to see is greater incentivization from the administration, from the provost office to say very specifically and very clearly that this is something that will count in a positive way towards promotion and review and so you don't need to worry about that. But I think it's actually a really important point because when I think about like just thinking about the campus and who I really would love to be involved in S3P, it's often people who are really really young and really energetic and want to be involved and and I'd like to be able to to see more of that. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Yeah. I'll just make a comment, being in the academic world, I understand where you're coming from because service is so underappreciated right in the tenure process. And I think you're absolutely right. It should be counted. It should be counted heavily towards the tenure process. So I strongly support you. 

Let me just see, so John Halbert mentions again about this program the predecessor program was a collaboration between Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford but I think you're saying this program might have been remote, Ben? 

Ben Geller ’01 I'm sorry I'm not familiar, I am not familiar with the program. It sounds like it was exactly similar to this in person. I'm just looking at the, yeah it says it looks like one host college hosted students from the three places residentially. 

Liz Campbell ’92 And then I think one final question that I see here that hasn't been answered is and I think you you have addressed this but maybe they they would like you to expand a little bit more at Swarthmore they learned a lot from foreign students and what percentage of the scholars are from other countries? I know you noted that right now none but maybe.

Ben Geller ’01 Yeah, it's tricky. We've had a couple students from Guam and I will say based on just the mere travel and the period of time to adjust to the time change it's been challenging. But there's also just a lot of issues around so I mentioned the timeline where like you're applying in May and then you're arriving in July and in that really short time between deciding you're going to participate in S3P and arriving all sorts of things related to like health insurance and vaccination records and all this stuff needs to happen. And there would be additional sort of logistical constraints around making that happen for international students. There's no reason and also just identify the right applicants from international just because there might be less information about those schools. So it's probably not as well known which schools are the most or least resourced. But in principle it's something we discuss every year. We always end up deciding that it's really complicated. But I absolutely agree that this program would benefit and I will say that our mentors, our student mentors have been international at times. So the scholars do get the interaction with international students in that way. 

Liz Campbell ’92 Wonderful. So I think that's the end of the questions. I did want to just add a couple things here. One is that, you know, as a first-gen student and someone that was completely clueless and someone in STEM, I would have really benefited from this. I was so clueless and I think it's amazing and I wish I can go back. I wish the program was there. You could go back in time with Amy and set it up [laughs], but I think it's a really wonderful opportunity. I'm really glad everyone here is so enthusiastic and supportive and want to, you know, volunteer, be a mentor and support. Like Ben said, feel free to email him, you know, with any ideas you have. Ben, is there anything you want to add before we close? 

Ben Geller ’01 No, I just really appreciate all these questions and all this sense of wanting to contribute. It's really really valuable and uplifting for me. And so, please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you'd like to talk further. 

Liz Campbell ’92 And Ben, you have someone from the program that's saying thank you for the opportunity. and they say that they can confidently say it was the key to success at Swarthmore. So, thank you for that, Orlando. Thank you, class of 2024. 

Ben Geller ’01 Thank you.