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,