Scholarships Help Students Transfer to RIT from 2-Year Colleges

The Multi-department Engineering and Engineering-technology Transfer, or MEET, scholars program targets transfer students from two-year colleges. The program supports 30 students majoring in engineering and technology this year and 15 students in each of the next three years.

Five academic departments at RIT are collaborating on the four-year, $396,000 grant, which supports recruitment and retention of transfer students through the NSF's Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarships Program. RIT is providing additional funding of $90,000 toward the program, which is also backed by RIT's Enrollment Management and Career Services Division.

“Transfer students in RIT's engineering technology and engineering programs are well-prepared and focused, and they have excellent retention rates,” says Carol Richardson, professor and chair of RIT's electrical, computer and telecommunications engineering technology department in RIT's College of Applied Science and Technology. “This grant allows us to create another community of RIT scholars that will be very successful while they are at RIT and in their future careers.” Richardson is the project's principal investigator.

A grant from the same program in 2002 helped RIT launch the $1 million EMC² scholarship program for engineering, mathematics, computer engineering and computer science students.