At the School of Science, community engagement includes quality of life, work environment, mentorship, inclusion, belonging. We work to integrate these considerations into every aspect of programming and activities across our school. Our premise is simple: talented people come from all backgrounds, and being able to recruit the best talent ensures that we continue to do the best science. With that in mind, our activities focus on inclusion and belonging across the entire school.
Our three main pillars of operation:
- Policies and Processes: We work to ensure that our policies and processes are designed in a way that eliminates the potential for bias. For example, our faculty search guidelines incorporate equity and screen for potential bias at every step of the search process; our review process for junior faculty take into account contributions such as informal mentoring. We have recently launched a mentorship evaluation pilot project. These examples collectively aim to ensure that our processes are fair across the school, and that equity and inclusion considerations are taken into account within all our processes.
- Outreach and Education: We actively support programs aimed at broadening participation, and we invest on every level: K-12 programs such as MITES, undergraduate programs such as MSRP (including MSRP-Bio) and the BCS Research Scholars Program), and graduate fellowships to recruit outstanding talent to MIT. In addition, keeping in mind the severe under-representation of Native American and indigenous groups in science, we participate in the Navajo Nation Math Circles program. Besides this, our departments offer application assistance programs to potential new students, especially first generation and low-income students.
- Inclusion and Belonging: We promote this in many ways, including programs like Quality of Life Grants; Community Service fellowships; staff awards; grants to departments to support programming; regular check-ins with faculty and graduate student leaders; special events around community topics and themes. We also sponsor membership to National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) for all our faculty, graduate students, and postdocs.
Listed below is information on various initiatives and programs managed and/or supported by the School of Science
