The national conversation on the mental health, resilience, and well-being of graduate students has escalated across the higher education landscape. Within STEM disciplines, competition, power-differentials and the importance of the advisee-advisor relationships are added to the stressors of field and bench research. Within this back-drop, the expanding diversity of STEM graduate students promises new perspectives and ideas that can accelerate research progress, but only if graduate schools improve inclusivity to foster an environment where students thrive, complete their degrees, and are positioned to not only join the professional STEM community but to assume leadership of it. Mental Health Opportunities for Professional Empowerment in STEM (HOPES) is a three-university collaboration consisting of Montana Technological University, Montana State University Billings, and the University of Montana HOPES will design, pilot, assess, and implement evidence-based, sustainable and replicable strategies to facilitate and enhance graduate-student mental health. Student experiences will be designed, piloted, and evaluated to equip and empower diverse graduate students—across the full range

We introduced diverse and humanized scientist role models into data literacy instruction and quantified changes in student attitudes towards science. We found that the impact of science role models depends on student racial identity.

At the University of Washington Tacoma (UWT), a public, predominantly undergraduate, minority-serving institution (Asian-American, Native American, Pacific Islander, AANAPISI), the Achieving Change in our Communities for Equity and Student Success (ACCESS) in STEM (NSF S-STEM) Program supports low-income, STEM-interested students by providing focused mentoring, a living learning community, a course-based research experience in their first year, and scholarships in their first two years of college. Program participants achieve higher grades and earlier entry to STEM majors. These positive outcomes may be of particular interest to programs supporting STEM-interested students in their first two years, particularly at AANAPISI institutions.

The Circle of Excellence addresses the multifaceted concerns of educational inequality in STEM experiences and outcomes. Since 2017, the program has met to provide challenging math and science enrichment to Black and Brown youth (over 300 hours of service work). During 2020, various virtual opportunities were provided to participants featuring STEM-related field trips, STEM guest speakers (usually African American men in STEM for the benefit of role modeling), coaching for academic competitions in science, and tutoring. Work with Circle of Excellence families has been multi-year, longstanding, and consistent. Regular use of the Zoom platform makes our current continuation of activities possible.

This is just an example.