The University of South Florida (USF), St. Petersburg campus, is looking to educate more minority and local girls in school about the STEM industry through their MESA program.
The MESA program stands for Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement and will be the first of its kind in the southeast. Its mission is to serve as a STEM pipeline for minority children and girls. Faculty felt it was important to implement this program as programming, IT, and engineering are among the top jobs in Tampa Bay and there is a diversity gap in who fills those positions.
“The problem is that a lot of these individuals in STEM look like me, older white men who are the ones who are in the STEM fields, and this is an issue,” said STEM professor and program coordinator at USF, David Rosengrant.
USF St. Pete received a $75,000 grant from Duke Energy this year to start tackling the problem of diversity in the STEM field. The university will use this money to start these programs for underrepresented kids through MESA.
“Our dean was a student in MESA when he was in California, and it had such an impact on him as an African American male growing up being exposed to a career in something that he thought might not ever be possible,” said Rosengrant.
According to Pew Research, only a quarter of women work in STEM and black and Hispanic people are severely underrepresented in the field as well.
The MESA program hopes to solve this problem by going into schools that need the most exposure.
“That’s what the MESA program really does. It gets individuals, women and minorities who never maybe even thought about STEM as an option for them. But we do is we show them these are the career options for you in STEM. It’s not just a person in a lab coat, sitting behind a bench or sitting in a lab. STEM encompasses so much more than that,” said Rosengrant.
The MESA program will focus on public schools in Tampa Bay, starting in Pinellas County and then working out to Hillsborough, Sarasota, Manatee and Pasco counties.