Rebekah Dupont: I remember a story when one of our students was ... You could tell something was wrong. He wasn't himself and we found out that he was having a tooth problem and he didn't have the money to go to the dentist and it was impacting everything. If your tooth hurts, how can you learn physics? And so a family of people figured out a solution and it was, you know, it was taken care of, but that's the kind of thing that somewhere else, someone might, might just think that this student is not engaged or might, you know, might draw a different conclusions than what is the underlying cause why, um, the student isn't being successful right now and what's impacting you and how can I help.

Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg is built on its faculty and student relationships, and the discoveries and successes born from those meaningful convergences. Rebekah Dupont, director of STEM programs shares a few of her most memorable accounts. These are the stories of some of Augsburg's best and brightest and they're only a small taste of what takes place here each and every day. Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg Podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and stuff that I'm honored to work with every day.

Rebekah Dupont: Mike Alvaz was a student who came and visited Augsburg in the spring and had incredible interest in chemistry, and we encouraged him to apply for the scholarship and then we were able to connect him with Dave Hansen in the chemistry department to do summer research before he had even taken any classes at Augsburg. And so, he came to Augsburg, did full-time summer research, participated in the URGO summer research program and then started classes in the fall. By having that experience and that track record of on-campus experience, Mike was able to apply for a summer research experience at University of California, San Diego, and was selected to participate and he had a very positive experience there and also got to know many faculty mentors who were research faculty.

And he came back to Augsburg for his senior year, was continuing to do research here at Augsburg, so now he had multiple research experiences, he had research mentors, both at Augsburg and at other places nationally, and he applied for one of the most competitive scholarships for students going on in the sciences which is the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which is a fellowship that if you receive it, you receive full funding for multiple years as a graduate student and so not only is your tuition paid for, but you receive an annual stipend that's very significant and it allows you to go and have your own research idea. You take that scholarship or fellowship rather with you to whatever institution you go to, so it makes you very, very desirable as a, as a graduate student. And he was able to receive one of those fellowships and is now studying at the University of California, San Diego, working on a PhD in environmental chemistry.

A student story that is really near and dear to my heart is a, an Alumna named Chandra Erdman. She was a McNair scholar and, um, mathematics major and also had studied, um, significant amount of sociology. And we worked together on a project that used census data. Chandra is African-American and had lived in North Minneapolis, and we looked at the sociological concept of hyper segregation and we wanted to look at using census data and looking at how we could do a mathematical model of this process. Chandra was a student who had a, a level of initiative and drive that was just very impressive, but she also had, um ... Not had a lot of access to higher education, so it was an amazing experience to be able to mentor her and to work with her, connect her with opportunities that helped her move forward in the direction that she wanted to go, which was, was pursuing more mathematics. She ended up becoming the first African-American to receive a PhD in statistics from Yale University ever.

She was recruited by colleges and universities across the United States and she was also recruited by Wall Street, um, and interview with Goldman Sachs, but she really wanted to work for the Census at that time, and she had applied to the Census and, um, haven't heard anything back. And she saw that the director of the Census was giving a presentation in Washington D.C. and so she decided she was gonna get on a train and go down and see his presentation and make that personal contact. So she did that and when the presentation was over, she went up to him and said, "Well, you know, I really enjoyed your presentation and I just want you to know that I've applied for a position and I haven't heard anything back." And they had this great conversation, and needless to say within, you know, a very short period of time she was, um, visiting and doing interviews and then did end up working at the Census for, for quite a while. And after that she went on and worked doing some data analytic consulting and now is, is working for Google. And so she's had an extremely interesting career.

We had an Alumni panel in the mathematics department, and one of the panelists, who's an Alumna named Kassie Benjamin Ficken, and it was really great to hear some of her, her story as she was relating in to our current students. Kassie's native American and always loved mathematics, but when she got to her junior and senior year in high school, she really struggled in connecting with her teacher and feeling welcomed in a classroom and ended up not feeling good about mathematics and decided not to go on in that area. And she had been working in a daycare and really loved working with kids, it was very, very good at it and was thinking that that would be a career path for her and was not necessarily even planing to go to college. One of her mentors took her aside and said, "You know, I really think you should think about going to college," and she ended up applying to Augsburg and coming here. And so she was studying elementary education.

And for elementary education students take a little bit of math, but they're not required to take a lot of mathematics. And she had a physics proffers who, um, she was taking a, a general education course in physics and he noticed her amazing talent for mathematics and said, "You need to be taking more mathematics, you need to be taking physics." So she began taking the course work again and she thrived, she did extremely well in her classes and she ended up perusing a double major in elementary education and full mathematics major. And she has progressed from teaching at the K through five level to teaching in middle school and then now is teaching at south high school in Minneapolis and has come back to Augsburg and is completing her master of arts in education. So it was really wonderful, first of all to just see how successful she is and how she viewed her Augsburg experience positively, but also the different faculty who had taken time to recognize her talent and to get to know her and then to advise her thinking both what she could do in the near future, but also at the long term future goals and hopes for, for what she might want to do.

Paul Pribbenow: That was Rebekah Dupont, director of STEM programs. Thanks for listening to the Augsburg podcast. I'm president Paul Pribbenow. For more information please visit augsburg.edu.