More than 100 students from local community colleges visited Rice University Nov. 8 as part of a transformative program meant to increase science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degree completion and educational access for Houston-area students from underresourced and historically excluded communities.
Established in 2022 as a partnership between Rice, San Jacinto College and Lone Star College, the Take Flight STEM Pathway is designed to promote high-achieving students’ continued interest in STEM fields, facilitate completion of their associate’s degree and prepare them for transfer into a four-year STEM degree program.
Amy Dittmar, Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, addressed the students at Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium before they began their day of experiencing what it is like to be a student at a premier research university.
“Rice is committed to making an excellent, four-year STEM education accessible to all high-achieving students,” Dittmar said. “The fellow Rice students, faculty and staff you will meet are committed to your success and will be allies on your educational journey. Today, you’ll get a taste of the culture of care that characterizes our community of learners at Rice. It is my hope that you will get to experience this again in the future as Rice students.”
The visiting students sat in on engineering and science classes, had a question-and-answer session with Rice peer academic advisers, ate lunch in the dining halls of Rice’s residential colleges, mingled with leaders of several Rice student organizations and heard from faculty about the cutting-edge work happening in their labs and paid summer research opportunities available to students at Rice and research universities across the U.S.
“The Take Flight program is one of the more rewarding things that I’ve been able to work on in my time working in higher education over 10 years now,” said Andy Osborn, program manager of educational initiatives at Rice. “Rice has so many resources and so much expertise, and we also have these amazing partner institutions here in Houston that are doing really important work. So if we’re able to partner with Lone Star College and San Jacinto College, we can bring really impressive students here and get them thinking about staying in STEM or transferring somewhere like Rice to complete a four-year degree.”
Roxana Torres, a first-year student at Lone Star, attended the Take Flight event to explore opportunities in criminal justice, particularly in the science and humanities fields. She expressed her excitement about visiting classes at a four-year university.
“I wanted to come here today because I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet new people that are also interested in similar things that I could be interested in,” Torres said. “It’s very exciting that I get to have this opportunity to experience all the things that they’re offering right now and to see how the professors interact with the students here.”
The program has been so successful in bringing quality students to Rice over the past few years that the Take Flight Alumni Ambassador (TFAA) program has emerged. TFAAs are former Take Flight students — now Rice undergraduates — who aid current Take Flight students through the process of exploring the possibilities of their future education.
One of this year’s TFAAs is Ella Lopez. A Lone Star Honors College graduate and a 2024 Goldwater Scholar, Lopez is currently a Rice junior majoring in mechanical engineering.
“One of the biggest advantages of being a Take Flight student is you get to have a lot of connections here at Rice before you actually come to Rice,” Lopez said.
Lopez said the introductory processes of becoming a student as well as the engineering course requirements at Rice were much easier to adapt to due to the familiarity of the campus and culture that Take Flight provided.
“Being able to have a support group of other students who are going through the same things as you is really great to have,” she said. “Rice and Lone Star were both very welcoming and very supportive with everything I wanted to do. That’s why I wanted to come back as an alumni and just help them get more students into this program and help more students get better connections.”
There are currently 13 Take Flight alumni enrolled at Rice. Take Flight alumni have also transferred successfully to STEM degree programs at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Houston, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.
“We have an incredible talent pool in the Houston service area, and a lot of our students come to Lone Star College to meet various needs,” said Katie Caruso, associate vice chancellor for honors and international education at Lone Star. “We want to make sure that we don’t just build the bridge halfway over the river. We want our students to really be prepared for their next steps.
“Considering the incredible talent pool, it makes great sense that we would work with a partner in Rice University. It’s a privilege for me to participate in this and to watch how transformative having these sorts of partnerships can be for our students and where they want to get.”
To learn more about the Take Flight program, click here.