Build an Equitable and Empowering Culture
To be a truly equitable and diverse institution, we must build a compassionate community that is characterized by a strong sense of belonging and the joy of intellectual pursuits, purposeful work, and meaningful opportunities.
Embed Equity and Diversity into Every Aspect of College Life
Diverse teams foster creativity, innovation, and performance. Prospective students are inspired when they see people in the field who look like them and share their cultural capital. It is a moral imperative to remove barriers to the field for the historically underserved, because an engineering degree represents opportunity.
The COE must do all that we can to bring our students, staff, and faculty closer to the regional demographics that we serve, and to create an inclusive and equitable culture where all can reach their potential.
Recommended Actions:
- Perform outreach and develop curriculum to attract more women and Black/African-American students.
- Recruit women, Hispanic/Latinx, and Black/African-American faculty, and Hispanic/Latinx staff.
Conduct annual COE climate surveys to gauge progress on inclusivity initiatives.
Remove Barriers to Success for All Students
Known barriers to engineering student success include lack of role models and mentors, uncertainty in navigating the college environment, or insufficient financial resources. Being in a minority, not having a community, or experiencing microaggressions from implicit biases can lead to feelings of not belonging in college and the field.
Recommended Actions:
- Pursue fundraising and grant opportunities to support equity and diversity efforts.
- Develop a comprehensive student success resources program, which may include: scholarships, internships, work study, research assistantships, student clubs, tutoring, and cohort programming.
- Redesign courses with largest equity gaps using responsive pedagogies and instructional design.
- Institute senior and graduate exit surveys annually to collect feedback on barriers respondents have faced and resources they have used.
Build a Compassionate and Purposeful Campus Community
Understanding and respecting each other are key to building a compassionate and purposeful community. To achieve these goals, a Community Code of Conduct, intergroup dialogue sessions, and inclusion workshops for staff and students are suggested.
Recommended Actions:
- Develop a COE Community Code of Conduct.
- Engage in facilitated intergroup dialogue with faculty and staff.
- Provide professional development opportunities on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion for employees and students.
Progress:
$2.5M K-16 Collaborative Grant In 2024, the COE received a $2.5M grant from the State of CA (administered through LACCD and Unite-LA) to develop equitable workforce pathways in engineering, computer science, and health in the Long Beach Region, in collaboration with CHHS, Provost’s Office, LBCC, and LBUSD. In the COE, we proposed to develop workforce pathways leading to careers in computing, which includes outreach to middle and high schools, expanded dual enrollment opportunities, strengthened articulation and roadmaps, BESST cohort placement, and paid internships. A secondary goal is to recruit, engage, and support the success of African American/Black students and women in these pathways, and we will be working with the Math Collaborative to increase exposure to these opportunities for these groups. The COE personnel involved in this project includes Antonella Sciortino, Saba Reda, Ava Hedayatipour, Marina Crawford, Brenda Santillan, Aimee Reyes, and Jason Deutchman.
Intergroup Dialog Training – Truth and Racial Healing Toolkit Drs. Angela Locks and Shametrice Davis led an Intergroup Dialog Training for 30 members of our extended leadership team in 2023-2024, which included the COE Cabinet, the Engineering Faculty Council, and at-large members. It is the hope that a critical mass of colleagues with increased awareness enabled by the training will contribute to future conversations and progress in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Internships For All The COE initiated a goal to have 100% of our undergraduate students engage in a paid internship in their field prior to graduating. An internship is especially important for first-generation students who do not have parents in the field or the built-in mentorship that many engineers take for granted. Based on the 2024 Senior Exit Survey, 45% of our graduating seniors have had an internship related to their major while a student in our programs, which has increased from 32.5% in 2022. We have strengthened our collaborations with the CDC and the new Office of Internships and Community Service. The Dean's Advisory Council has a subcommittee working on internships. We recently hired an Internship Coordinator to further these efforts.
Last updated: Sep. 9, 2024
Outreach Recruitment videos were produced in collaboration with NBC-LA and the Diverse Pipeline Subcommittee of the Dean’s Advisory Council in 2021. The BEACH Women in Engineering Conference, spearheaded by the 100+ Women Strong Group, has held its 3rd annual conference in April 2023. There were 270 attendees (high school, community college, and university students) as well as robust corporate and individual sponsorship. The COE will be partnering with the BOSS organization to recruit diversity from high school districts in LB and LA.
COE Climate Survey The COE Climate Survey was developed by CEEE and the COE Climate Survey Task Force (Darr Hashempour, Joe Kalman, Panadda Marayong, Glen Seymour, and Lisa Star) in AY 2021-22, and was administered in Spring 2022. The results of the Climate Survey were presented in a COE Town Hall meeting on November 3, 2022. COE Employees can request a copy via the COE Climate Survey Request Form. Discussions are underway with the Director of Equity and Diversity, Dr. Angela Locks, as well as the Dean’s Commission on Equity, Diversity, and Racial Justice on next steps and interventions. The intention is to administer the survey every two years to gauge progress on college climate.
Fundraising and Grants Recently awarded grants to the COE supporting DEI include: “AANAPI Student Success Center and Development” ($1.5M, DoEd-ASCEND, 2022; Pitiporn Asvapathanagul et al); “Innovating Faculty Workloads through an Equity Lens” ($1M, NSF-ADVANCE, 2022; Karyn Scissum Gunn, Sergio Mendez, et al); “Consortium for Hispanic and Indigenous Education on Robotics in Space” ($131,139, NASA-MUREP; Antonella Sciortino and Saba Reda); “An Active Learning-based Educational Program for Hispanic STEM Students through Industry-University Partnership”; ($2.1M, NSF – HSI STEM,2020; Ehsan Barjasteh et al)
Student Exit Surveys A senior exit survey was developed and administered in Spring 2022 to collect feedback on our programs and student experience. The intention is to administer the survey every two years as part of our continuous improvement process for the undergraduate programs.
Updated: Aug. 8, 2023
