2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

Building an Undergraduate Cohort in High Altitude Ballooning

City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), in partnership with DePaul University and the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, has recently been awarded a grant from NASA to develop a research and education program in high-altitude ballooning. The project builds on the Chicago Initiative for Research and Recruitment in the Undergraduate Sciences (CIRRUS) model of undergraduate research and community college/four year college collaborative projects, a successful NSF-funded collaboration between DePaul and CCC. The project has four goals: (1) initiate a year-round undergraduate research program to recruit promising community college students into the STEM disciplines, (2) provide tuition support and fellowships to support student degree completion and transfer, (3) transition students research into the undergraduate classroom using problem-based learning, and (4) host faculty development programs throughout Illinois to help other faculty members initiate their own high-altitude ballooning programs and share the classroom materials. In the presentation, we will discuss the CIRRUS model of undergraduate research, our processes of building the NASA-funded program, and present preliminary student research from the spring activities.