Undergraduate Research at FIU (URFIU) Conference

STEM Identity and Pre-Med Students

The degree to which an individual identifies as a "STEM person" (i.e., STEM identity) has been shown to be highly related to whether they choose to pursue and remain in a STEM career. Research around STEM education and STEM identity has often focused on students pursuing a STEM degree, but the relationship between pre-med/health students and STEM identity--particularly as it compares to students who are not pre-med--has not been well-explored. Addressing this gap is important if we want to understand how to recruit and retain students in pre-med or health careers using identity-based interventions. My overall research interests focus on this gap in the literature, and is guided by the following broad pursuit: Do pre-med students pursue STEM majors because of their personal scientific discipline passion or because such majors lay a foundation for a variety of career options? Specifically, in this abstract, I present research directed towards understanding the relationship between STEM identity and enrollment in pre-med tracks. Given the country's current impetus around STEM and STEM education, understanding what and who counts as "STEM" and who are "STEM people" has far reaching implications. For example, funding agencies, as well as local education agencies (e.g., school districts), make distinctions between STEM programs and programs related to the medical sciences, which may limit the content and design of those programs, as well as who participates. The National Science Foundation—a government agency that funds much of the research in STEM and STEM education—generally excludes medical and health sciences from the types of programs they fund. As a consequence, minimal research exists regarding whether or not students on a pre-med/health track pursuing a STEM degree see themselves as STEM people. In exploring STEM identity development, our team recruited college undergraduate students taking at least one introductory STEM course. We emailed a survey to these students through Qualtrics in which we asked respondents to rate the degree to which they saw themselves as STEM people using an 11-item instrument validated in past research. We also asked respondents to provide information regarding their gender, ethnic identity, sense of home support for science, and other factors relevant to students' STEM identities and career decision-making. Among our survey respondents (N = 522, response rate of around 10%), 84% reported pursuing a STEM major. Of those students, more than half (i.e., 61%) reported themselves as pre-med students, meaning that the majority of the undergraduate STEM majors who responded to our survey aimed for careers in medical fields. We then tested a multiple linear regression model to see whether being on the pre-med track (i.e., independent variable) predicted respondents' sense of identity as a STEM person (i.e., dependent variable) while taking into account relevant factors like pursuit of a STEM major, gender, Hispanic ethnicity, and home support for science. Statistically significant results revealed that not being on a pre-med track is negatively associated with STEM identity regardless of the factors stated above (ß = -0.11, p<0.05). Our results suggest that students on the pre-med track are  more likely to report having a greater sense of STEM identity than students not on the pre-med track. We also found thought-provoking results concerning home support and STEM major. Students who reported not having a home environment supportive of science were less likely to express a high STEM identity compared to students who did report having home support.  Although we found no statistically significant relationship between gender and identification with STEM, we do note that other aspects of our work suggest differences in STEM identity as a factor of student gender may exist, which is also in line with prior research (Dou et al., 2019). As a student seeking a biology degree who identifies as a STEM person and is also pursuing a career in medicine, both this study and its findings have personal meaning for me. Prior literature has revealed little regarding this topic. Nevertheless, questions about the relationship between being on a pre-med/health track and seeing oneself as a STEM person are not new. A plethora of relevant online discussion forums exist. Due to this topic's importance and resonance with my own experiences, contributing to this knowledge and disseminating these findings has allowed me to make contributions to the way others think about STEM fields and what it means to be a person pursuing careers in those fields. The results are clear: students who are on premed tracks will identify more like STEM people than those who are not on the pre-med track. Although we do not yet know the reasons why pre-med students identify with STEM more so than non-premed STEM majors, this finding has implications for STEM education programming and funding. Florida International University, 11200 SW 8TH ST, Miami, Fl. 33199