Mentoring and Outreach for the Stars Alliance Program

The Stars Alliance is an NSF-funded program that includes about 20 colleges and universities, mostly in the Southeast. Its main focus is to increase the numbers and diversity of students in computing fields. This includes Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Science and Technology, and many other computing and technology related fields. The University of Tennessee Knoxville joined the Stars Alliance in the spring of 2008, and this branch is headed by Dr. Lynne Parker. More information for the Stars Alliance Program can be found here

Some of the goals of this program include:

• Increasing the number of students in computing fields
• Increasing the diversity of computing programs by reaching out to underrepresented groups
• Improving the retention rate of those who start in computing fields
• Encouraging undergraduates to become involved in research activities and to continue on to graduate school
• Promote outreach activities by reaching out to high schools, middle schools, and community services
• Promote leadership skills in students

What Stars will be doing at UTK starting in the fall semester 2008 will be to initiate the following:

1. Create a mentoring program for UT students in computing fields (such as Computer Science). We have 3 undergraduate students in Computer Science and Computer Engineering, and 4 graduate students in CS who either received their BS degrees in CS from UTK or who took extensive undergraduate CS courses here. These students (as well as myself) will be available to answer questions, give advice, make suggestions about what courses to take, etc. Students may be more comfortable speaking with fellow students than with faculty. We are not controlling what these students tell you, as you might get different advice from each of the 8 students. However, you will be getting the opinions of students who have been in the program. We hope that by doing this it will improve the retention rate.
2. Outreach. We will be doing outreach to some local high schools, and we will also be doing outreach to local home schoolers (two of the students in Stars were homeschooled locally themselves)
3. Dr. Lynne Parker will be working with the Stars students on such things as leadership, research activities, etc.

For more information on joining Stars or the mentoring opportunities it offers, please contact Dr. Parker at leparkert@eecs.utk.edu.