Minority Retention Program Celebrates 20 Years of Success
A top national college program for retaining minority engineering students celebrated its 20th anniversary over homecoming weekend at Clemson.
PEER, the Programs for Educational Enrichment and Retention Office, welcomed alumni and current students in the Madren Center Ballroom for a dinner celebration sponsored by Eastman Chemical Company. Paul Montgomery, who heads up talent management for Eastman was the keynote speaker.
On Saturday, Oct. 20, the group hosted a tailgate on the second floor of Cooper Library from 9 a.m. to noon. Radio station WJMZ-FM 107.3 and WHZT-FM 98.1 provided entertainment and carried on-air student testimonials.
“PEER was an oasis in a big sea,” says 1991 electrical engineering graduate Donna Poindexter Smalls, who was the first in her family to go to college and who initially felt daunted by her new surroundings. She said the program helped her navigate the college system from what courses to take to how to talk to professors.
“If I didn’t have PEER, I would have felt alone, lost in the system,” says Corey Smalls, who met his wife Donna through PEER. Corey is a 1992 electrical engineering graduate. “It grounded me with a starting point and then it gave me lifelong friends, including my wife.”
PEER serves all African-American and Hispanic/Latino American students in the College of Engineering and Science (CoES), providing a variety of services that include an innovative proactive mentoring program, the Math Excellence Workshop, the PEER/WISE Study Hall and personal and academic counseling.
“PEER connects minority engineering and science students to one another,” says director Sue Lasser. “Each group of students instructs and inspires the next. Expertise is handed down from year to year.”
Among predominantly white schools, Clemson is in the top 10 in the nation in numbers of African-American students graduated in technical fields each year. Black Clemson students graduate in these fields at the same rate as their white counterparts, about 48 percent of each entering class. The national average for black engineering students is 21 percent.
PEER’s proactive mentoring approach has been duplicated at other institutions around the country and has attracted interest from as far away as South Africa. Lasser was awarded one of the first national Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Engineering and Mathematics Mentoring. Both Lasser and Robert W. Snelsire, professor of electrical engineering and co-founder of PEER, have also received Clemson’s Martin Luther King Award for Excellence in Service.
In addition to proactive mentoring, other highlights of the program include:
- Math Excellence Workshop (MEW) - National Science Foundation-sponsored through the Louis Stokes South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation. It is also sponsored by Duke Energy and the CoES. MEW students outperform other students in their summer mathematics classes and graduate in science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors at a significantly increased rate. MEW earned national recognition with a Noel-Levitz Corporation Retention Excellence Award.
- Sneak Preview - Primary recruiting event for PEER. High school students get a “sneak peak” at university life and attend classes. Eighty percent of participants go on to attend Clemson.
- WISE - Originally an outgrowth of PEER, WISE (Women in Engineering and Science) encourages girls and women to consider technical majors.
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