Building a Better ‘Bridge’ to the Ph.D.

As an undergraduate, Rose S. Perea never doubted her ability in physics. That changed in her master’s program.

“The math just got super hard,” she says. “I started questioning my performance compared to the other students and wondered whether I belonged in graduate school.”

Ms. Perea, who is Hispanic, had set her sights on a doctorate. She knew she had hurdles, like low GRE scores, and at New Mexico State University, she failed to pass a qualifying examination.

Feelings of academic inadequacy are common in graduate school, but diversity advocates say they hit black, Hispanic, and American Indian students harder because those groups are sharply underrepresented in academe, especially in science and engineering. It’s impostor syndrome, that nagging academic self-doubt, compounded by stereotype threat, or the risk of confirming negative expectations of one’s group.

But a partnership between a historically black college and a major research institution is trying to support more students working toward doctorates and to reduce the underrepresentation of minorities in some STEM fields.

The program, in Nashville, helps students make the transition from a master’s at Fisk University to a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. Ms. Perea, who had learned about the bridge program and decided to press on, started the master’s at Fisk in 2011. She immediately gained access to Vanderbilt mentors and research labs, counseling services at Vanderbilt to keep her impostor syndrome in check, and a network of faculty and peer support at both institutions. She is now a third-year Ph.D. student in physics and astronomy.

As colleges face pressure from student activists to diversify their graduate programs and faculties, advocates say support for aspiring doctoral students in master’s programs is a crucial part of that pipeline, one too often overlooked. Students of all races often struggle in the transition from a master’s to a Ph.D., but colleges committed to diversity should pay special attention to that phase of the journey, says Keivan Stassun, a professor of physics at Vanderbilt who helped found the bridge program.

Research indicates that underrepresented minorities are significantly more likely than whites to earn a master’s degree en route to a Ph.D. Minority students more often come from colleges without the courses or resources to prepare them for success in a doctoral program, and may not have the GRE scores to enter one directly. A master’s degree gives them another route into a Ph.D. program and a couple of extra years to prepare.

The bridge program started in physics and astronomy in 2004 and has since expanded to biology, chemistry, engineering, and materials science. Students start in a Fisk master’s program with the goal of transitioning to a Ph.D. program, typically at Vanderbilt but sometimes elsewhere.

The program seeks the students most at risk, those who might otherwise be left out of graduate education because of low GRE scores or other factors, says Dina M. Stroud, its executive director. It looks for qualities in applicants like grit and persistence, says Ms. Stroud, who is also a research assistant professor of physics and medicine at Vanderbilt and an adjunct professor of physics at Fisk.

“We want the students who genuinely need us,” she says. “The diamonds in the rough.”

The success rate so far is impressive. Of the 98 students who have entered the program since 2004, 21 have earned a doctorate. Fifty-six are pursuing a master’s or a Ph.D. Seven have earned a master’s degree and opted not to continue, and of those who’ve started a Ph.D., only four have dropped out so far.

‘Intrusive Mentoring’

Even before Ms. Perea’s first semester at Fisk began, she was in a classroom with her cohort of bridge students. They had arrived a couple of weeks early to brush up on mathematics or computer skills, and take placement tests to see where each one needed help.

“Traditionally, in any graduate program, students are told, ‘Here are the requirements. Here’s the curriculum. Do your best,’” Mr. Stassun says. “The first thing we do is an assessment of where you need to start in the curriculum to make sure you on-ramp successfully. Every student would benefit from that, but it rarely happens in graduate programs.”

Mentoring is at the core of the bridge program. Students have access to layers of mentors: researchers at both Fisk and Vanderbilt, peers just ahead of them, and Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers at Vanderbilt, many of whom were bridge scholars themselves.

The program’s administrators take pride in what they call “intrusive mentoring.” They try to extinguish small fires before they engulf a student. It’s not unusual for a student who misses a meeting with a faculty mentor or who skips a test to get a knock on his or her door, at home, from Ms. Stroud.

Every month, she and others meet to discuss students’ progress. She displays each student’s name on a dashboard in green, yellow, or red, depending on whether the student appears on track, could use some guidance, or needs immediate attention. The sessions allow faculty and staff members to compare notes.

“The idea is you don’t wait for students to come to you,” Ms. Stroud says. “We don’t let little things go. We’re constantly talking to each other.”

That support can be the difference between completing a degree and dropping out, says Claude Mack III, a bridge student who started in 2007. “If a president or provost put the money and politics that are needed behind a program like this, great,” he says. “But that alone won’t get the job done. You need people who care and can develop those personal relationships.”

Mr. Mack earned his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from Vanderbilt in 2014 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in Germany. But like many minority students, he says, he faced a steep learning curve in graduate school. “When I heard people talking about ‘tenure,’” he says, “I thought they were saying ‘10-year.’ I was like, I guess if you’ve been working for 10 years, you get hired on permanently.”

Mr. Mack says he simply wasn’t prepared to go into a Ph.D. program straight from his undergraduate degree. He worries that students like him are being shut out of graduate education. “Many students are capable and have the potential to do very well,” he says, “but just didn’t have access to the same resources.”

Ms. Stroud’s meetings with bridge students have underscored that mental health is a major concern. One of the program’s several seminars meant to demystify graduate school is about impostor syndrome, and Ms. Perea found it especially helpful. She was also directed to Vanderbilt’s counseling center, where she learned to manage her feelings of academic inadequacy with the help of a licensed psychiatrist.

Money is another barrier to retaining underrepresented graduate students. Those in the program “are very vulnerable financially and may already have significant debt burden from their undergraduate degrees,” Mr. Stassun says. “It would be an untenable proposition to ask these students to take the risk of financing the master’s degree themselves.”

Master’s students often don’t enjoy Ph.D.-level funding, but at Fisk, in addition to having their tuition and health insurance covered, they each receive a stipend of $22,000 a year.

Bridge Building

Mr. Stassun applied for a job at Vanderbilt partly because the chair of the physics department at the time was committed to enrolling more minority students. Once he was hired, he met with physics faculty members at Fisk to explore a partnership, eventually teaming up with Arnold Burger, a professor there. With $2 million in grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, they accepted their first three students in 2004 and began building the bridge, Mr. Stassun says, “one plank at a time.”

Historically black colleges, he says, have a rich pool of talent often untapped by major research universities. The top 10 producers of African-American bachelor’s degrees in physics, he says, are all historically black colleges.

The partnership between Fisk and Vanderbilt has many advantages. They’re about two miles apart. Both are private colleges, making for less red tape than at their public counterparts. Fisk doesn’t have a physics doctoral program; Vanderbilt doesn’t have a physics master’s program. And perhaps most important, each institution has people committed to this idea.

“Two faculty members got together, got money, and started a relationship,” says Ms. Stroud, who has been executive director since 2012. “The relationships drive the whole thing.”

Not all relationships are positive, however. Ms. Perea says some Vanderbilt doctoral students not in the program view the bridge students as having entered through a back door. Relations between the two groups can be tense, she says, and it is sometimes difficult for the bridge master’s students to get into study groups with the Vanderbilt doctoral students.

As the partnership evolves, other challenges remain. Money for the program — about $1 million to $2 million per year, mostly for stipends — is pieced together from Vanderbilt, Fisk, and grants from several federal agencies. As more students enroll, providing rigorous mentoring gets harder, Ms. Stroud says. And the Vanderbilt counseling center is now available only to students paying tuition at the university (the Fisk master’s students take some courses at Vanderbilt, but their tuition goes to Fisk).

Despite the challenges, the program’s administrators hope more colleges explore similar partnerships. And if they’re not poised to do so, any graduate program can incorporate many of Fisk and Vanderbilt’s techniques, Ms. Stroud says. They can assess students at the start of their programs, connect them with mentors, and communicate better to track students’ progress.

Ms. Perea says she’s now confident as a graduate student, but the insecurity pops up now and then. When she passed a qualifying exam at Vanderbilt, the test that had derailed her a few years before, she thought it had to be a mistake. She scrawled on a chalkboard in her office that she passed, with the date. She looks at it every time she’s there.

Her mentors, she says, invested the time to understand her strengths, which include working with detectors that gauge planet composition, as well as her weaknesses. “Dr. Stassun and Dr. Burger noticed I had the ability to work well with these detectors before I knew it myself,” she says. “They have an understanding of where to place you, even though at first it might not seem like a good fit.”

Ms. Perea was “a little bitter,” she says, when she was initially placed in Mr. Burger’s physics lab. Her passion was astronomy. But that summer, partly because of the skills she had learned in the lab, she landed an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, working with detectors. That experience, she says, built the foundation for her research.

“That was the first time I actually got to work with a detector in the field,” Ms. Perea says. “The radiation-detection book we were reading had a lot of great information in it, but it doesn’t really make sense until you start working with the detectors. You can’t really understand it without having that experience.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.