Winds of Change - Summer 2017 - 28

VIP ROSE
STEM
participants
at SIPI enjoy
a strong
support
system.

"It takes a lot of time, passion, and love for
your students," he says. And he's right. SIPI is an
open-enrollment college, which means students
don't have to achieve a qualifying score on the
ACT or SAT to enroll, and many arrive lacking
proficiency in math and science. "It takes time
to get them up to speed," explains Vadiee.
When Vadiee recognized that some students
needed extra help, he enlisted the aid of
University of New Mexico students. "I worked
with professors from UNM, and in exchange I
asked them to send their graduate students as
mentors," says Vadiee. "I wanted them to work
with our midlevel and struggling students."
That approach has paid off. The average
enrollment in SIPI's engineering and engineering technology programs is about 60 full-time
students. According to Vadiee, this is about 40
to 45 percent of all pre-engineering students
enrolled in tribal colleges nationwide.
Still, he says there's a long way to go because
the playing field is not level. Despite the
investment in the past 20 years, the graduation
retention rate is low. "Seventy-five percent of
our students can't graduate in a timely manner,"
he points out.

BUILDING IN Support
To help students stay in school and graduate, the
original mentoring program has expanded, with
freshmen mentored by sophomores and
sophomores mentored by UNM students and
professionals in industry. This collaboration
among academic institutions and the business
sector is all part of the VIP ROSE STEM
program - Vertically Integrated Pyramid for
Research, Outreach, and Student Education in
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. "In VIP you see the community,
academia, and the industry working together,"
says Vadiee. "That entire system is there to
support the student academically. When students
come to SIPI they join a support system."
SIPI's VIP ROSE STEM program may soon
become a template. "I believe in sharing these
28 WINDS OF CHANGE * SUMMER 2017

resources with other tribal
colleges," says Vadiee. "Each
one of us is strong in one
aspect." By replicating the
program he is hopeful
that the tribal colleges
can share resources, aid in
capacity building, and
forge partnerships
To that end, Vadiee will
work with students and instructors from five tribal colleges this
summer in the Tribal Colleges and Universities
Advanced Manufacturing Technology Summer
Institute, funded by the American Indian
Higher Education Consortium. Attendees
should expect to spend time with robots.

OUTREACH WITH Robots
In VIP ROSE STEM, robots are a wow factor
that attracts and holds interest, so one of the
projects this summer will be to build a rover
mimicking the one on Mars. "We are going to
build six, and participants will take them back
to their colleges," Vadiee says. Then those robots
can be used as an outreach and education tool
to recruit and engage more students.
A different kind of outreach can be accomplished by adding a natural language processing
capability to the robots. At SIPI, students have
worked with Inquiry Facilitators Inc. to create a
code so a robot could understand simple
commands in the Navajo language. "There are
eight commands for the robot," Vadiee explains,
like "move forward" and "watch the wall." The
next step, he adds, "is for the rovers to process
and converse in the Native natural language, like
Siri on your phone or Amazon Alexa."
When you teach a machine to understand
and process a language, it's called computational
linguistics, and it's an example of how STEM
can bridge other fields, like language and
culture. Vadiee is excited about what it could
mean for preserving Native languages and
helping students who are learning them.

WHEN VADIEE
RECOGNIZED THAT
SOME STUDENTS

needed
extra help,

HE ENLISTED THE
AID OF UNIVERSITY
OF NEW MEXICO
STUDENTS. "I
WORKED WITH
PROFESSORS FROM
UNM, AND IN
EXCHANGE I ASKED
THEM TO

send their
graduate
students as
mentors,"
SAYS VADIEE. "I
WANTED THEM TO
WORK WITH OUR
MIDLEVEL AND
STRUGGLING
STUDENTS."

aises.org

SOUTHWESTERN INDIAN POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE (SIPI) - ENGINEERING PROGRAMS
(VIP ROSE STEM); COURTESY OF DR. NADER VADIEE (PORTRAIT); ISTOCK (ILLUSTRATION)

http://www.aises.org

Winds of Change - Summer 2017

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