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New Mexico State University

NMSU PAID Initiatives

The NMSU PAID Program focuses on four initiatives:

Alliance for Faculty Diversity (AFD) Committees

To coordinate diversity initiatives and work with administration to institutionalize successful strategies, each partner institution has developed its own faculty diversity committee made up of male and female faculty from various STEM departments ranging from junior level to department head. Los Alamos National Laboratory Earth and Environmental Sciences (LANL EES) is including postdoctoral employees on its committee since they will be a large focus of pipeline efforts.

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Mentoring

AFD partner institutions are developing and implementing their mentoring programs patterned after NMSU’s program, which has been in effect for 5 years under the NSF–ADVANCE program. The NMSU program is currently transitioning toward full institutionalization and includes STEM and Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) faculty with plans to expand across campus.

  • NMT mentoring is one-on-one and already consists of 15 pairs.
  • UNM is looking at a mix of mentoring models to accommodate its individual departments and colleges.
  • LANL EES is focusing on its sizeable postdoc population and developing a team-mentoring model.
  • NMSU utilizes the multiple mentoring model.

Intended outcomes of mentoring are increased productivity, research collaborations, lower sense of isolation, stronger attachment to the community, higher job satisfaction (and thus greater retention), increased efficacy in obtaining resources, and career advancement.

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Promotion and Tenure Workshops

Institutions will hold one to two half-day workshops each year, patterned after P&T workshops developed by the NSF–ADVANCE program at NMSU. Content can include legal issues, balancing family and work, politics and collegiality, and procedural issues. Attendance by junior faculty, members of college-level P&T committees, and deans allows for robust discussion and Q&A about the process and expectations. Intended outcomes include process transparency, faculty networking, timely preparation of packet, and anxiety reduction.

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Department Head Leadership Retreats

One two-day retreat is held each year in which leaders and Department Chairs from each institution attend. The retreat is a mix of workshops, panels, social events, and presentations, which focus on attracting and retaining high-demand faculty in STEM. Some past topics have been effective search committees, job advertisements to attract diverse candidates, competitive start-up packages, valuing diversity, family friendly policies, and the department chair as monitor and mentor. The ultimate goals of the retreat are to broaden applicant pools at each institution, institutionalize hiring practices for diversity, and retain faculty.

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Facilitation of the Pipeline

The Alliance for Faculty Diversity will work together to improve the pipeline to the professoriate. Initial focus will be on graduate students and postdoctoral employees. A network will be formed among the institutions as well as programs already established which attract and assist students in the STEM disciplines (e.g. AMP, NM AGEP, RISE, etc.) to better communicate placement opportunities for aspiring scientists and engineers.

The intended outcomes of pipeline facilitation are a professional network for students and postdocs, facilitation of collaboration, and improvement in each institutions capacity to compete for top-ranking researchers.

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Legislative Initiative

The Alliance Universities are also proposing a legislative initiative to fund start-up packages to attract diverse, high-demand female and underrepresented minority faculty in STEM. The Transforming Faculty for Diversity (TFFD) initiative is based on successful application of start-up funds at NMSU through the NSF ADVANCE award which doubled the rate of female hiring over five years.

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