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The Summer@CENS Research Scholars Program continues to be one of the key Education initiatives at CENS. The program is the core of our educational pipeline and is an excellent example of aligned Center research and education activities. The Summer@CENS Research Scholars Program serves as an umbrella for our undergraduate and high school summer research opportunities. It brings together talented undergraduates from around the country and local high school students to engage in Center research for 8-10 weeks over the summer. This poster highlights the structure of the program from planning to implementation as well as some of the outcomes resulting from the program. Also highlighted is the CENS Intel Scholars Program which allows us to extend the summer experience through the academic year for undergraduates at UCLA. This year, the CENS High School Scholars program has also been extended through the academic year to support continuation high school students in Central High School in the Mar Vista Projects.

At UCLA, the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) in the School of Engineering received NSF funding for a unique project titled: Women @ CENS, created to explore issues of gender equity in engineering and computer science (ECS) undergraduate research internship programs. The Women @ CENS project includes two studies: 1) an evaluation of our own CENS REU program and 2) a national study of REUs in ECS. The goals of these studies were to learn about promising practices in addressing gender equity in the REU setting from our own summer internship program, and to learn about what other REUs were doing in regards to promoting gender equity such that more women will choose to pursue advanced degrees and faculty careers in ECS. Study One utilizes the evaluation of the CENS REU over four program years to understand what has and has not worked for our female students in particular. For Study Two, we surveyed program directors of NSF funded Computer Science and Engineering REUs nationwide about espoused program goals, practices, participant demographics, and in particular, specific efforts designed to address gender inequity in these fields.

At CENS, our diversity initiatives continue to grow. We have developed several programs and partnerships that are designed to increase the number of underrepresented students pursuing advanced degrees in CENS related fields. To that end, we have developed a number of key projects to help establish a pipeline to graduate school and CENS research. Our Women@CENS program is designed to promote gender equity by focusing on our summer internship program as well as conducting a study on promising practices of undergraduate research programs nationally. With the completion of our study we look forward to sharing the findings on promising diversity practices. CENS has also continued to develop and maintain relationships and collaborations with partnering institutions and local colleges and organizations that focus on serving underrepresented students.

The goal of this study is to explore and compare the experiences and views that community college students face across multiple levels of parental education. The findings demonstrate significant differences [...]

This review of literature raises the issue of whether the term nontraditional is too broad to be helpful in identifying specific student needs at a community college because of the [...]

This chapter describes a sample of nondegree and degree programs currently offered to administrators, staff, and faculty in community college leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]