The four programs being evaluated in this report are:

  1. Bridges to Success Course: Pre/Post Survey.
  2. Career Fellows Internship Midpoint Survey.
  3. Fellowship Programs.
  4. Internship/Job Survey.

Part 1: Bridges to Success Course: Pre/Post Survey.

Introduction

Bridges to Success is a course designed to help preparing new students at the Colin Powell School to turn their college experience into personal and professional success. This course’s goal is to help students in:

  1. Developing essential skills and tools for successfully navigate college life and their future career.
  2. Connecting with the opportunities to explore the power of activism at CCNY.
  3. Providing introductory knowledge and access to the fields of Social Science at Colin Powell School.

In this report, data collected from students who completed this course in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 were analyzed, aiming to investigate whether students’ success in college and future career would be beneficial from the materials and lectures discussed in the course.

The student sample at a quick glance

Originally, there were 99 students enrolled in Fall 2021 and 71 enrolled in Spring 2022

Semester Student Count Percentage
Fall 2021 99 58
Spring 2022 71 42

The majority of the enrolled students were either of the two races: Black or Hispanic/Latinx.

About 69% of the enrolled students were born in the US, with 29.8% of these students were first generation attending college. Among 31% of the students born outside of the US, 35.7% were first generation in their family to attend college.

70% of the enrolled students were Freshman students, and 11% were New Transfer Students. Most students were from New York City.

About 70% of the surveyed students had not finalize their major at the time being surveyed.

The majority of those who already declared a major reported that it was Psychology.

Most of the students reported choosing their major because they wanted to either learn about such topics or help people.

In Fall 2021, 88 out of 99 students successfully completed/passed the course. In Spring 2022, 64 out of 71 successfully completed/passed the course. The data in the table below did record students who dropped the course early.

##              
##                A  B  C  D  P  F INC WU
##   Fall 2021   39 44  5  0  0  0   3  6
##   Spring 2022 32 26  4  1  1  2   4  0

Fall 2021 students appeared to do better in term of performance compared to those who took the class in Spring 2022.

Assessing Students’ Confidence Level After Completing Bridges to Success Course.

To evaluate the success of the Bridges to Success Course, we assessed students’ level of confidence BEFORE/AFTER completing the course across six (6) different domains:

  1. Students’ confidence in how to access resources (scholarships, fellowships, research, and internship/job opportunities) at the Colin Powell School.
  2. Students’ confidence in understanding the social science majors and departments at the Colin Powell School.
  3. Students’ confidence in understanding the history of City College and how its students have contributed to making the city and country better.
  4. Students’ confidence in networking and self-marketing effectively for their future career.
  5. Students’ confidence in having a polished resume and/or personal portfolio.
  6. Students’ confidence in obtain an internship during their time at college.

Comparison of Students’ Confidence Level in Different Domains between Fall 2021 and Spring 2022.

When comparing students’ confidence level in each domain, a score of 3 was considered as the satisfactory level as the students were rating on a 5-point scale. Any measurement above this satisfactory level was considered as higher confidence level, whereas any measurement lying below this was considered as lower confidence.

Students’ confidence in how to access resources (scholarships, fellowships, research, and internship/job opportunities) at the Colin Powell School.

Students’ confidence in understanding the social science majors and departments at the Colin Powell School.

Students’ confidence in understanding the history of City College and how its students have contributed to making the city and country better.

Students’ confidence in networking and self-marketing effectively for their future career.

Students’ confidence in having a polished resume and/or personal portfolio.

Students’ confidence in obtain an internship during their time at college.

When comparing confident score across students with different college levels, New Transfer Students and Returning Students have lower confident score before the course and tend to improve their confidence significantly after completing Bridges to Success course.

Therefore, if we look at each students’ level of confidence in each semester, Fall 2021 students experienced a decrease in confidence after completing the course although Spring 2022 students experienced a significant jump in their level of confidence after completing the course.

Even so, looking at across both semester, there were an increase in students’ level of confidence across all measured domains. Students in Spring 2022 reported to with stronger improvement in confidence level compared to the those in Fall 2021.

In general, our t-test result indicated a significant increase in students’ confidence level (M = 4.02, SD = 5.18) across the two semester (Fall 2021 and Spring 2022).

## 
##  Paired t-test
## 
## data:  After and Before
## t = 4.4858, df = 89, p-value = 1.081e-05
## alternative hypothesis: true mean difference is greater than 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  2.531843      Inf
## sample estimates:
## mean difference 
##        4.022222
## [1] "standard deviation"
## [1] 5.181162

Therefore, we can be sure that Bridges to Success Course DOES HELP students in building their confidence across muliple measured domains.

Do Fall 2021 students’ higher level of confidence after completing the Bridges to Success course would predict in students higher GPA score in Spring 2022?

A scatter-plot somewhat a positive relationship between Fall 2021 Post Confidence score and Spring 2022 GPA.

However, the result of a Pearson confirmed such relationship is NOT SIGNIFICANT.

## 
##  Pearson's product-moment correlation
## 
## data:  bsc_predict_df$post_score and bsc_predict_df$S22_gpa
## t = 0.46487, df = 35, p-value = 0.6449
## alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -0.2520810  0.3923955
## sample estimates:
##        cor 
## 0.07833647

A linear regression results was NOT SIGNIFICANT. There is no evident to prediction of Future GPA (Spring 2022) Based on Post Confidence Score (Fall 2021).

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = S22_gpa ~ post_score, data = bsc_predict_df)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -1.93567 -0.34465  0.09811  0.51157  0.81331 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept) 3.128741   0.280033  11.173 4.31e-13 ***
## post_score  0.007244   0.015583   0.465    0.645    
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.6598 on 35 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.006137,   Adjusted R-squared:  -0.02226 
## F-statistic: 0.2161 on 1 and 35 DF,  p-value: 0.6449

Word Cloud for Student’s general opinion

Part 2: Career Fellows Internship Midpoint Survey.

Analysis of Student’s Survey

Number of survey submitted:

## [1] 60

However, a few students completed the survey more than once, such as:

Name Counts
1 Allegra Durante 2
3 Christanya Symplice 2
5 Esmirna Mateo 2

Therefore, all of the rating scores items for these students will be the average score.

Since there is one question asked twice in the survey and the students’ rating were not consistent, the average rate was used in this analysis.

The Data at a quick glance.

What time tracking method have the students been using?

Time Tracking Method Student Count Percentage
Company Hour Tracking System 11 18
CPS Time Sheet 12 20
Google Sheets/Excel 13 22
Other 8 13
Paper Notes 16 27

Interns’ attendance and general performance.

There were 8 supervisors would liked to be contacted by CPS team to discuss more about the interns’ experience at their program.

All supervisors reported 100% of the participated students attended the program and met the objective requirements.

Attendance Performance Percentage
Yes Yes 100

The supervisors who need to be contacted were:

Supervisor Name Supervisor Email Internship Site Intern Name
Alice Mills Mai Centering Wholeness Counseling Katherine Vargas
Alice Mills Mai Centering Wholeness Counseling Khalil Gallop
Laura Liberman MD Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY Alexis Dickerson
Jennifer Taveras Stem Institute Alexander Pichol
Maureen Ramirez NYCERS Jay Garcia
Dr Ousmane Aly PAME Le Réseau pour l’Emergence & le Développement des Ecovillages au Sahel (REDES) Ondrea Kanwhen
Nathalie Lebron CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance Sultonmirzo Ravshanbekov
Sarah Hayes A Glimmer of Hope Monica Scotti

Do the students meet their goal?

Meeting Goal? Student Count Percentage
Not sure 5 8
Yes 55 92

The students who were unsure if they meet their goal are:

Student The internship helps gaining confidence in professional setting Supervisor rating The internship helps with professional networking The internship helps gaining more career knowledge
Christanya Symplice 3 3.5 3 3.0
Christine Bascombe 2 5.0 2 5.0
Tara Snover 4 4.0 5 1.0
Vanessa Crowe 4 5.0 3 4.5
Yi Wendy Ng Liang 4 5.0 4 4.0

When checking data from the intern organization we noticed that only two (2) of these students had their supervisors completed the survey.
Both students got high rating from their supervisor across the board.

Student Supervisor Site Attendance? Meet objectives? Willing to improve? Intern Rating Quality of Work Time management skill
Christanya Symplice Sarah Martin New York City Department of Education - Office of Policy & Evaluation Yes Yes 5 5 4 4
Yi Wendy Ng Liang Cindy-Ann Pascall Brooklyn TCAC Yes Yes 5 5 5 5

Christanya Symplice were also one of the three students who completed this survey more than once. So it’ll be more reliable to check her raw data to see if her responses were consistent. And they were not.

Here is the inconsistency in her responses

Meet Goal? Opinion about the Internship The internship helps gaining more career knowledge The internship helps gaining confidence in professional setting Supervisor rating The internship helps with professional networking
Yes Learn how data is able to create a voice for change. 4 4 4 4
Not sure no highlight 2 2 3 2

Christanya Symplice’s supervisor at the New York City Department of Education - Office of Policy & Evaluation - Ms. Sarah Martin’s opinion about Christanya Symplice was:
I would say overall, the highlight of having Christanya on our team so far has been her great questions! She challenges us to name why we do what we do - and every team needs someone who does that! She has brought her past experience as a parent coordinator into our work - and that experience and first-hand knowledge is invaluable to us!

Rating

Students’ Rating

Students’ rating score were relatively above the average line across all measures:
1. How beneficial the internship was in building students’ confidence.
2. How helpful their supervisors were during the internship.
3. How beneficial the internship was for students to gain professional connection.
4. How much info about student’s career path they learned through the internship.

Supervisors’ Rating

Supervisors’ rating score were relatively above the average line across all measures:
1. The intern’s willingness to take challenge and improvement.
2. The intern’s evaluation in general.
3. The intern’s quality of work.
4. The intern’s time management skill.

Word Cloud of Opinions

Students’ Opinion about the Internship Experience

Supervisors’ Opinion about the Interns

Supervisors’ Suggestion to Interns’s Future Training

Part 3: Fellowship Programs.

Overview:

Colin Powell School Fellowships are programs provided annually for both undergraduate and graduate students, aiming to create a platform to help student gain experience in their field of study.

In this report, we focused on four (4) fellowship programs:

  1. Climate Policy Fellows Program.
  2. Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service.
  3. NBCU Academy Fellow Program.
  4. Racial Justice Fellow Program.

Each program was design to connect students with different organization specialized in the students’ field study, and help them building specific skill sets neccessary for their future career.

The Fellowship Program in 2022

There are a total of 136 students applied to Colin Powell Fellowship Programs this 2022, in which we received 67 applications for Climate Policy Fellows Program, 23 applications for Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service, 21 for NBCU Academy Fellows Program, and 25 for Racial Justice Fellows Program.

Program Counts
Climate Policy Fellows Program 67
Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service 23
NBCU Academy Fellows Program 21
Racial Justice Fellows Program 25

Application General Statistics.

A large portion of the applicants is Asian (n = 41) followed by Black/African American (n = 33) and Latinx (n = 30)

Most applicants reported that they learned about these fellowship programs from Emails (n = 75), Faculty (n = 50) and Peers (n = 34).

About 55% of the applicants were born in the US (n = 73)

US Born? Student Counts Percentage
No 57 43
Prefer not to state 3 2
Yes 73 55

Among these US Born Applicants, only 21% having US Born parents.

Parents were US Born? Counts Percentage
No 44 33
Prefer not to state 1 1
Yes 28 21

49% applicants reported having at least one parents graduated from college.

At least 1 Parent with College Degree? Counts Percentage
No 62 47
Prefer not to state 6 5
Yes 65 49

The majority of applicants considered themselves as females (She/Her/Hers, n = 77) while 49 applicants considered themselves as males (He/Him/His). There were also other types of gender identity being reported (n = 8 or 6%).

Pronouns Student Counts Percentage
He/Him/His 49 37
He/Him/They/Them 3 2
Name 1 1
She/He/They 1 1
She/Her/Hers 77 57
She/Her/They/Them 2 1
They/Them/Theirs 1 1

Application Acceptance Rate

The overall acceptance rate was 52%, with 71 applications being accepted and 65 being rejected.

Decision Student Counts Percentage
Accepted 71 52
Rejected 65 48

To better understand whether difference attributes affect applicants’ chance of being accepted to a fellowship program, a few questions were asked to investigate.

1. Were applicants who were US Born more likely to be accepted?

By comparing Final Decision (Accepted or Rejected) between US-born and non-US-born applicants, there was not much of a difference in acceptance rate between US Born applicant () and Non-US Born applicants.

2. Were applicants whose parent was with a college degree more likely to be accepted?

Similarly, there is no difference in acceptance rate among applicants whose parents with or without a college degree.

3. Were applicants who had participated previously in another fellowship more likely to be accepted?

There is no difference in acceptance rate between applicants with or without previous fellowship experience.

4. Do being a full Time status and having more Current Credits affect acceptance rate?“

The majority of the applicants (96%) has been taken classes full-time and will continue their next semester as full-time students. Therefore, students’ status does not really affect applicants’ chance to be accepted to a fellowship program.

While comparing differences in number of current credit among applicants to see if this attributes would affect students’ chance to be accepted in a fellowship program, we noticed that accepted applicants tend to have slightly more number of credits.

However, an independent t-test indicated NO SIGNIFICANT difference in number of current credits between Accepted (M = 72 credits) and Rejected Applicants (M = 69 credits), t(131) = 0.3841, p = 0.7015.

## 
##  Two Sample t-test
## 
## data:  response$credit by response$Final.Decision
## t = 0.38414, df = 131, p-value = 0.7015
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means between group Accepted and group Rejected is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -10.35064  15.33922
## sample estimates:
## mean in group Accepted mean in group Rejected 
##               71.63714               69.14286

GPA Comparison Between Accepted versus Rejected Applications.

Cummulative GPA is also an important attribute to assess students’ college performance. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate if applicants’ GPA affect acceptance rate.

In this analysis, we consider GPA = 3.0 as the GPA satisfied level, with GPA > 3.0 as higher level of college performance and GPA < 3.0 as lower level of college performance.

Based on the boxplot and mean bar visualization, Accepted Applicants appeared to have slightly higher mean GPA all though the majority of the applicants (both Accepted and Rejected) had GPA > 3.0 (higher level of college performance)

## 
##  Two Sample t-test
## 
## data:  response$Cumulative.GPA by response$Final.Decision
## t = 0.92771, df = 134, p-value = 0.3552
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means between group Accepted and group Rejected is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -0.1687849  0.4670072
## sample estimates:
## mean in group Accepted mean in group Rejected 
##               3.316296               3.167185

However, an independent t-test indicated NO SIGNIFICANT difference in Cumulative GPA between Accepted (M = 3.3163) and Rejected Applicants (M = 3.1672), t(134) = 0.9277, p = 0.3552.

Accepted Applicants’ GPA Comparison Accross Programs.

Since there was NO SIGNIFICANT difference in Cummulative GPA between Accepted and Rejected Applicants, there might be a chance that different fellowship program weighting the GPA attribute differently.

By visualizing GPA difference across programs with boxplot and mean error bar, we noticed that:

  • Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service accepted students with higher Mean GPA.

Still, all of the error overlaps, there were NO SIGNIFICANT difference in Accepted Applicant GPA across programs.

##             Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)
## program      3   0.16 0.05341   0.214  0.886
## Residuals   63  15.71 0.24939

A One Way ANOVA test also confirmed such result: NO SIGNIFICANT difference in Cumulative was found across program, F(3, 63) = 0.214, p = 0.886.

Actual Participated Applicants

However, there were 5 applicants who got accepted but latter declined the offer, leaving only 66 students actually participated in the fellowship program after being accepted.

Decision Student Counts Percentage
Accepted 69 51
Accepted but Declined 5 4
Rejected 62 46

The five later declined applicants were 2 from Racial Justice Fellows Program and 1 in each of the other three programs: NBCU Academy Fellows Program (1), Climate Policy Fellows Program (1), and Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service (1), leaving the actual participated students in this year fellowship being distributed as:

Program Application Counts Percentage
Climate Policy Fellows Program 26 38
Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service 14 20
NBCU Academy Fellows Program 14 20
Racial Justice Fellows Program 15 22

Application Rate Over Time.

1. Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service (2018 - 2022).

Colin Powell Fellowship in Leadership and Public Service is the program that has been in service the longest time out of the four program.

According to our data, there has been a decline of 34.29% in number of total applications from 35 applicants in 2020 to 23 applications in 2022.

However, the program’s acceptance rate has been increasing consistently from 31.43% in 2020, to 51.85% in 2021, and currently peaks at 65.22% in 2022.

Year Acceptance Rate
2018 43.75
2019 35.29
2020 31.43
2021 51.85
2022 65.22

2. Racial Justice Fellows Program (2020 - 2022).

Racial Justice Fellows Program has been in service since 2020, but has been consistently receiving less and less applications over the past three years, decreasing 63.24% from the total of 68 applications in 2020 to 25 applications in 2022.

Year Acceptance Rate
2020 19.12
2021 39.22
2022 60.00

3. Climate Policy Fellows Program (2020 - 2022).

Similar to Racial Justice Fellow Program, Climate Policy Fellows Program has been in service since 2020. Like other programs, the total number application applied to Climate Policy Program was decreasing 21.18% from 85 applications in 2021 to 67 applications in 2022.

Year Acceptance Rate
2020 35.62
2021 35.29
2022 40.30

4.NBCU Academy Fellows Program (2021 - 2022).

NBCU Academy Fellows Program started to provide connections and support for students since 2021. Still, like others, the total number of application declining from 26 to 21 applications in 2022.

Year Acceptance Rate
2021 57.69
2022 71.43

Part 4. Internship/Job Survey.

The data collected for the Internship Program at Colin Powell in 2022 divided the student body into two different categories:

  • Not yet a senior: freshman, sophomore, and junior level students.
  • Senior: senior and recently graduated students.

There were a total of 555 participated in the program with 219 senior students and 336 Freshman/Sophomore/Junior students.

Student Categories Counts Percentage
Not yet a senior 336 60.54
Senior 219 39.46

The General Statistics.

Students’ Major Distribution

Among Freshman/Sophomore/Junior, the majority student participated in the internship programs were from Psychology major (n = 149, 44.48%), following by Administration and Management (n = 45) and Economics (n = 36)

Among Seniors and Graduate Students, the majority student participated in the internship programs were also from Psychology major (n = 87, 43.07%), following by Political Science (n = 26) and Economics (n = 26)

Job Sector

As being reported, the majority of students at all college level hope to find job in Public/Government sector:

  • Not yet a senior: n = 146, 39.35%.
  • Senior: n = 108 30.68%

Job Interest.

As being reported, the majority of students at all college level hope to find job in Counseling and Human resoucse.

Issues Hope to Change.

In both group, the majority of students in both group hope to change in mental health issue and racial justice.

Resources Knowledge.

Comparing between the two group, senior students were more aware of CPDI service as a resource whereas both CPDI service and LinkIned Page were popular among Freshman/Sophomore/Junior students. Nonetheless, both group were not aware much of Colin Powell Career Handbook.

Resources Rating

Freshman/Sophomore/.Junior: Internship Beneficiary Rating.

Activity Attendance

A large number of students in both group have never participated in any Colin Powell events.