Development, Leadership, Visibility Initiative

Pipeline Issues: CIC, WISE Dorm, Outreach

To focus on stemming the loss of women from science majors in the first two years of college, the Women in Science and Engineering Residential Program (WISE-RP) was founded in 1995. WISELI-RP creates a supportive and empowering community for women by housing 115 freshmen and sophomore science/engineering students together on adjacent floors of an all-women's residence. The program offers special WISE-RP sections of key courses such as general chemistry, organic chemistry, and introductory biology. About 25-30% of the WISE-RP participants are engineering majors, about 40% are biology majors, and the remainder are scattered among the other sciences. Now in its seventh year, the WISE-RP has had more than 600 undergraduate participants. Each year since the program's inception, WISE students earned significantly higher than average grades in both of our University's challenging two-semester gateway Chemistry sequences. They also have significantly higher GPAs than either UW freshmen women as a whole or a matched group of women science/engineering students from nother dorm, and are less likely to binge drink. As an umbrella program, WISELI will facilitate interaction between undergraduate women in the WISE-RP, Graduate Women in Science, and women scientists and engineers across campus. This successful program will be presented as part of the national workshops for administrators.

Update:

The WISE-RP conducted its own evaluation, thus WISELI will not invest resources on duplicating their efforts. WISELI continues to maintain strong ties with the WISE-RP, as well as other student organizations serving women in science & engineering.

Additional links of interest: