Through the Intellectual Entrepreneurship: Cross-Disciplinary Consortium at UT, students of diverse backgrounds are being introduced to graduate-level work.
Though it did not begin as a diversity initiative, a five-year-old program at the University of Texas at Austin designed to give undergraduates a taste of what graduate school is like has drawn a significant number of underrepresented minority and first-generation students.
Together they made up 50 percent of the students who participated last spring in the Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE): A Cross- Disciplinary Consortium’s pregraduate internship, a program designed to demystify graduate school for undergraduate students. During the “internship,” undergraduates work closely with a graduate student mentor and/or faculty supervisor to create their own research experience, investigating their chosen field of study as well as the implications of their work in their communities.
It began in 1997 when Dr. Richard A. Cherwitz founded the IE consortium, a collaboration between schools and colleges at UT that took up the task of educating “citizen-scholars.” After conducting a survey about the consortium’s demographics, Cherwitz found that many students were attracted to the “citizen scholar” theme and wanted to make a contribution to their community.
“Many of the first-generation and underrepresented students have really deep passions and commitments to give back to their community,” Cherwitz says.
The program has introduced graduate school to students who otherwise wouldn’t go, like Mayra Hernández, who credits the pregraduate internship for influencing her decision to attend a graduate program in social work at UT.
