Rutgers Future Scholars: For academically promising students who dream of going to college, the Rutgers Future Scholars Program provides a new kind of support system. This past summer, a select group of 200 students entering eighth grade from Rutgers’ home communities of Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, and Piscataway took part in academic enrichment activities on Rutgers campuses. Highly recommended by their teachers and school administrators, Future Scholars exhibit academic potential as well as financial need. The multiyear program—with residential experiences in the summers, weekend seminars throughout the school year for students and their parents, and college admissions test preparation—will provide opportunities for educational growth and enrichment and expose the students to career paths they may not have thought were available to them.

The Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems participated by providing chemical and pharmaceutical engineering experiments. This is also a great way for the center to track these seventh grade students to their senior year and beyond if they chose to attend Rutgers University. To ease the financial burden of higher education, Rutgers promises to cover four years of tuition and fees for Future Scholars who meet admission requirements and choose to attend the university. They will be first-generation college students, a population that Rutgers has a long history of serving. C-SOPS will be there every step of the way to see to it that these students reach their goals. The center will also take the lead in developing a Parent Learning Community (PLC) for the student’s parents in summer 2009. Each year, up to 200 additional eighth graders from Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, and Piscataway will join this first class of Future Scholars as they make strides toward brighter futures.

Science Bus Explorer: The Rutgers Science Explorer is a 40-foot, state-of-the-art, custom-designed mobile laboratory and science demonstration center that will bring exciting and innovative hands-on activities to middle schools. The bus features interactive exhibits and laboratory exercises in the life sciences, earth science, and the physical sciences. Rutgers graduate and undergraduate students will staff the bus and conduct the presentations. The Rutgers Science Explorer accommodates two Rutgers instructors, 20 students, their teacher, and up to two visitors per teaching session. We will create our own pharmaceutical engineering demos and take them to local schools where many students would have a chance to actively participate. The experiments would be lead by undergraduates, who would go through a training program so that they could be prepared to teach students who have no engineering background. (The Explorer team already has a training program in place). A particular focus on reaching underrepresented minority children would be emphasized.

RET: An educational engineering summer camp for middle/high school science and math teachers. To attract their participation, the teachers would receive a modest stipend and supplemental funding would be sought through the NSF Research Experience for Teachers program. The teachers would participate in workshops and provided lesson materials for incorporation into the technological literacy component of NJ State core curriculum content standards. The group would be followed through subsequent years of the program and we expect to evolve the material appropriate to different grade levels. This program will build on and benefit from existing Center for Pre-College Programs (CPCP) at NJIT and other outreach efforts targeting pre-college teaching.