Faculty Praise Mentor-Connect

Posted by on .

Mel Cossette coaches Jonathon Beck on the final details for submitting his Advanced Technological Eduction grant proposal during the Mentor-Connect leadership development workshop in Chicago. Cossette is executive director of the MatED National Resource Center. Beck is an instructor at Northland Community and Technical College in East Grand Fork, Minnesota.

Mentor-Connect's leadership development strategies and proposal-writing advice get big thumbs up from its mentees.

"It has been the most fantastic experience I've had professionally in years," said Jacqueline Smith, assistant professor of Engineering Technology at Chattanooga State Community College.

She and four other community college educators who were in the first Mentor-Connect cohort enthusiastically endorsed the Advanced Technological Education outreach initiative at a Mentor-Connect workshop on July 22 in Chicago. All of the speakers had recently received official notice from the National Science Foundation that the grant proposals they had prepared with Mentor-Connect's guidance were funded.

The application process for the third cohort of Mentor-Connect mentees for 2014-15 is now open. Twenty colleges will be selected to receive mentoring on the basis of applications that are due October 10. See http://www.mentor-connect.org for more information.

Mentor-Connect is using those most experienced in the ATE Program to help colleges that have not received National Science Foundation funding in the past 10 years prepare competitive grant proposals. Principal Investigator Elaine Craft describes this Mentor-Connect system as a “regenerative mentoring process” where those being mentored today will be developed as leaders to mentor others in future years thereby expanding the impact of the ATE program.

All the Mentor-Connect mentors have years of experience serving as principal investigators of ATE grants or have done significant work in the ATE program. The mentors not only coach the mentee colleges' designated faculty members over nine months as they prepare ATE grant proposals, the mentors also facilitate connections to other ATE projects and centers.

“I sure enjoyed the experience. Anytime you can be associated with the National Science Foundation it brings immediate credibility on a professional levels,” said Hugh Gallagher, a career coach at the Community College of Beaver County (CCBC) in Monaca, Pennsylvania. He found it particularly valuable to visit several Texas community colleges that used ATE support to create an industry-endorsed process technology degree program.

Vince DiNoto, CCBC's mentor, suggested the trip for Gallagher and Pradeep Kumar, a mathematics and chemistry instructor. CCBC leaders agreed to fund it as part of Gallagher’s and Kumar's background work to create curricula that meets the needs of oil and gas companies that are expanding drilling operations in Western Pennsylvania.

DiNoto's leadership of the National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence (GeoTech) was recognized at the High Impact Technology Exchange Conference last week in Chicago. He received the Innovative Program Award for developing a community of practice among educators and students to meet the needs of the emerging geospatial industry.

Gallagher and Kumar also praised DiNoto’s encouragement during periodic conference calls. They particularly remember him holding them to the timeline goals they set up for writing their ATE grant proposal when they met face-to-face for the first time at Mentor-Connect's two-and-a-half day grant proposal workshop in early 2013. DiNoto is a physics professor at Jefferson Community and Technical College, and serves as dean of College and Systemic Initiatives at the Louisville, Kentucky college.

Kumar also said that DiNoto's team approach required him to gain system-wide knowledge of the college that he had recently joined from industry. "To me it was a great experience," he said. When the local newspaper featured the college's effort to improve its process technology program, he said, "It made me feel I was doing something good and making an impact."

Sharon Gusky, a biology professor at Northwestern Connecticut Community College in Winchester, Connecticut, said ATE's requirement that faculty work with industry on developing innovative curricula connected her for the first time with manufacturers near her rural college. Although their products are not biology-related, she learned that several of them want to hire people with the quality control skills that she teaches.

"It really helped strengthen the connection with the community,” Gusky said.

She also pointed out that her mentor, Peggie Weeks, suggested that she begin with the end in mind and develop an evaluation plan as she wrote the grant. Gusky said she would not have contacted an evaluator so early in the process without this advice.

"Looking at the assessment, the evaluation piece, really early on in the project was really helpful. We used things like the logic model and the EvaluATE website and resources that they have there. So that really helped us focus what we were doing. By looking at what we wanted to end up with and how we were going to know we got there," she said. Weeks, a former NSF program officer and now an educational consultant, previously taught engineering and engineering technology for 16 years at Corning Community College in New York. Weeks also mentored Chattanooga State Community College after Annette Parker, the college's original mentor, resigned from the Automotive Manufacturing Technical Education Collaborative (AMTEC) to become president of South Central College in Mankato, Minnesota. AMTEC is part of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System in Versailles, Kentucky.

Based on their success as first-time NSF grant applicants, the Mentor-Connect mentees offer the following tips for preparing ATE grant proposals.

  • Begin drafting the proposal months in advance of the deadline.
  • Develop a two-minute "elevator speech" summary of your grant proposal to win over administrators, board members, industry partners, and colleagues.
  • Work with the college's finance office at least six months in advance of the NSF submission deadline to ensure that the college understands NSF requirements and is prepared to negotiate the college's indirect cost reimbursement rate with the federal government.
  • Ask industry partners to provide letters of support for the grant a month before the NSF deadline for proposals.
  • Revise the draft of the proposal over several months based on feedback from industry and experienced ATE principal investigators.
  • Make sure all the essential information is included in the NSF's 15-page grant application form; use the appendix only for ancillary information.
  • Ask a colleague on the English faculty to read a next-to-final draft of the proposal for clarity and grammar.
  • Read all the directions for submitting proposals via NSF's FastLane months or at least weeks in advance of the deadline.
  • Submit the proposal via FastLane a week before the deadline so you have time to resolve any technical issues with the online process.

Mentor-Connect’s webinars have lots of other advice for writing NSF grant proposals. See them at https://www.youtube.com/user/MentorConnect13.

Categories:
  • education
  • engineering
  • science
From:
    ATE Impacts

Last Edited: July 29th, 2014 at 9:21am by Madeline Patton

See More ATE Impacts

Comments

There are no comments yet for this entry. Please Log In to post one.