IGE Track 2: Graduate Communities for Academic Fellowship & Efficacy (Grad CAFE): A Holistic Multi-tiered Mentoring Model

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award to the University of Arizona will help to increase the success of STEM graduate students through the creation, expansion, and assessment of the Graduate Communities for Academic Fellowship and Efficacy (Grad CAFE) program. Grad CAFE is a strengths-based, holistic, intersectional, interdisciplinary multi-tiered mentoring community that has the potential to transform how graduate scholars in STEM and beyond are supported by addressing challenges in mental health and well-being among graduate students, and recruitment, retention and completion among STEM graduate students. Unlike most mentoring programs, Grad CAFE creates a peer mentoring community within a multi-tiered mentoring program. Additionally, Grad CAFE creates a space for all students to come together and build community. Finally, Grad CAFE is a multi-year program that students can join in their first or second year, complete their comprehensive exams and return as a community leader and provide near-peer mentoring for newer students while building their teaching, facilitation, curriculum, and leadership skills. Grad CAFE will provide a blueprint for creating and scaling up from a small cohort to over 200 students in the fifth year without significantly increasing the time commitment for faculty and staff, providing an easily replicated model for other institutions to follow. Grad CAFE seeks to identify evidence-based best practices for holistic, community-based support for supporting graduate students in STEM. The theoretical framework of Grad Cafe is based on factors impacting student persistence at institutions like the University of Arizona. Grad CAFE is a multi-tiered mentoring program that spans the entire UArizona STEM ecosystem. The project seeks to identify, through formative and summative assessments, how Grad CAFE impacts STEM graduate students through several measures: 1) a greater sense of capacity, 2) improved sense of self-efficacy, 3) greater sense of interest, 4) greater sense of community, 5) increased satisfaction, 6) higher retention rates, and 7) higher completion rates as compared to non-participants. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.