Performing Department
AFRE
Non Technical Summary
The main objective of this integrated project is to provide students the opportunity to participate in research and extension projects with a focus on data analytics to address important challenges in the areas of agfinance, food marketing, and food security. Students will work with each other and faculty members fromfour institutions. At the culmination of the program, students will attend the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association meeting to present their work and participate in student competitions, conditional on acceptance. Each cohort will include 12 students, a total of 60 students during the five year project. The program is available to students offour institutions (Michigan State University,Auburn University,Oregon State University, andUniversity of Georgia)in their junior year. The program is also available to second-year students of community colleges who plan to transfer for an undergraduate degree at one of the four aforementioned institutions. Each year, a selection process will be used to admit a diverse group of students, prioritizing students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students who show exceptional promise to become leaders in the agricultural and food industry. Each university will contribute no more than 25% of the cohort in any given year.Students will be paired up with faculty, as well as mentors from industry, to provide them with guidance and insight in their chosen academic and career paths. In addition to four faculty members, there will be a total of 12 external mentors. The mentors represent a diverse group of professionals in various stages of their careers, and eager to assist the next generation of professionals in the food and agriculture industry.With this project, we strive to equip students with valuable skills that will lead them to more successful careers, while also contributing to workforce and future leadership development for the food and agriculture industry nationwide.This proposal addresses AFRI Farm Bill Priority Areas 3 and 6.
Animal Health Component
70%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
70%
Developmental
30%
Goals / Objectives
This integrated project includes an Exchange Undergraduate Research and Extension Program in Finance, Marketing, and Food Security, with applications from the Food and Agriculture Industry. Faculty and students from four universities, Michigan State University, Auburn University, Oregon State University, and University of Georgia, will work together in the course of five years to deliver a model program of undergraduate research and extension. The program is open to students from these four institutions, as well as students from community colleges that plan to enroll as transfer students into these four institutions.This project targets underrepresented students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.In this project, our goal is not only to provide valuable learn-by-doing opportunities to students, but also expand their horizons, connections, and ability to creatively solve problems of national significance. To do so, we have designed an exchange undergraduate research and extension program, a collaboration of four large state institutions spread out geographically. All students will have the ability to work with, be mentored by, and build connections with faculty from all the institutions. In addition, students will work with each other as part of research and extension teams, hence helping build life-long professional connections.Each year, 12 students from at least four different universities and community colleges will be accepted into the program, hence a total of 60 students will participate in the five-year project. Faculty will guide students in research and extension projects in a 20-week long program. Students will attend short lectures prepared by faculty to introduce them to best practices in research and extension work. Students will work individually and in groups during the program, and deliverables will include research papers and/or extension projects. All students will be required to submit their work as either a potential presentation or as part of a student competition at the annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and all students will attend the AAEA meeting in the summer of each year.Students will be matched with research and/or extension mentors (one of the four investigators on this project) based on their area of interest, within the fields of agricultural finance, food marketing, and food security. In addition to being the faculty adviser in the research/extension program, investigators will also mentor students, providing them with information and guidance in their applications to graduate school and/or job applications and career choice. In addition, each student will be paired with a mentor from industry or an extension agency. The external mentors will meet with students to share their own experiences and to guide students in their chosen career paths.This integrated program provides students with a unique experience to sharpen their data analytics and research skills, get experience in extension, be mentored by faculty members and external mentors, and present their work at a national conference, where they will have the opportunity to interact with other researchers and build connections. Students will also have the opportunity to sharpen their leadership skills while working in small groups.Since research and extension projects will be in the fields of agricultural finance, food marketing, and food security, this project addresses AFRI Farm Bill priority areas 3 (Food Safety, Nutrition, and Health) and 6 (Agriculture Economics and Rural Communities).
Project Methods
1. ApproachEach year, in the fall term students will be invited to apply to the program. The application process will include both merit-based questions, as well as questions about students' backgrounds, circumstances, personal education, and career goals.To be eligible, students need to be in good academic standing and be a junior at the time of application. Community college students need to be in good academic standing, be in their second year of their associate degree, and express interest in applying to be a transfer student at one of the four institutions represented in this project. The application period will be open from September to November each year, to allow as many students as possible to apply.The selection process will be carried out by the four professors in the month of December. The selection process will include both an individual assessment of the application packages by each faculty member, as well as group deliberations with the goal of selecting a diverse group of students, prioritizing students from disadvantaged backgrounds including students of limited financial means, and first-generation students; as well as students who show exceptional promise to become leaders in the agriculture industry. In addition, faculty will make decisions based on a good match between students' interests and our areas of expertise.2. Program DescriptionThe first cohort of students will commence the program in January 2025, with the rest of the cohorts starting each January until 2029. Students will be matched with faculty across the four institutions, based on faculty's areas of expertise and students' areas of interest. Students will work in groups of 2-3 students, and groups will include students from more than one institution. In the first two weeks, students will get acquainted with each-other and with faculty leaders, via a series of meetings. During this time, students will also be required to attend three asynchronous lectures prepared by the faculty and complete activities showing mastery of the materials. Lecutres include: Lecture 1:Introduction to Academic Research;Lecture 2: Introduction to Extension, andLecture 3: Introduction to the AAEA Student Competitions and Conference.In the following weeks, students will work with their faculty advisors to carry out the research and extension projects. Research activities may include but are not limited to background literature review, data collection, data analysis utilizing software such as Excel and Stata, hypotheses testing using appropriate econometric techniques, writing the results in a research paper format, preparing presentations for the AAEA conference. Extension activities may include but are not limited to the above research activities plus writing stakeholder-centered publication (e.g., blogs or fact sheets), developing Excel tools for stakeholder use, and delivering presentations to stakeholders about the project.Students will work closely with the faculty advisor throughout the duration of the research and extension projects. The faculty adviser will, wherever appropriate and needed, require students to attend additional short lectures to sharpen their skills in certain areas (for example, a brief lecture on how to conduct a multivariate regression analysis using Excel or Stata). Based on the faculty's experience working with undergraduate and community college students, students at this level need a lot of guidance and support in the completion of research and extension projects, unlike graduate students who tend to be more independent. As such, the faculty advisers will meet frequently with students, will break down projects into parts with corresponding deadlines, and will closely monitor students' progress while providing a lot of feedback. All projects will be completed by the end of June. This allows students to take some weeks off during the semester, for example around midterm and final exams. Students will then submit their projects for consideration at AAEA's student competitions.Concurrent with the research and extension program, this project includes mentorship opportunities for students. Each individual student will be mentored by one of the faculty members, and by one external mentor - a representative from the food and agriculture industry, or an extension agency. The goal of the mentorship component is to provide students with information, guidance, and feedback in their graduate school applications, job applications, and more generally, career options and career choices.3. Project EvaluationThe evaluation data collected will substantiate the fidelity of program implementation, program objective achievement, and overall value. An external evaluator with expertise in the field of agricultural education and extension and with experience as the evaluator on multiple federally funded projects, will evaluate the formative and summative components of the project, in addition to the longitudinal tracking of the student participants. The evaluation points were chosen based on the CIPP Evaluation Model, a comprehensive framework for guiding evaluations of projects (Stufflebeam, 2003), to create a structure that guides decision making and is flexible to respond to internal and external changes/influences.Formative Evaluation. On a quarterly basis, the evaluator will conduct a virtual meeting with the project team to provide a verbal and written formative evaluation report regarding progress toward yearly and end-of-project goals and to plan for next evaluation points in the project. This will include assessments of scholar check-in surveys, performance/completion of milestones and experiential learning evaluations will be analyzed to assess the student learning outcomes and to improve the program quality.Summative Evaluation. A summative report will be submitted each year by the external evaluator as to the successes, milestones, and improvements needed to facilitate the effective and long-term implementation of the project; these will serve as formative reports toward the end-of-project summative evaluation. The end-of-project evaluation report will document achievements and outcomes toward the project's objectives, student learning outcomes, and overall project.University records will be used to track the graduation of the student participants from their undergraduate programs. Non-university contact information will be solicited from participants for longitudinal tracking purposes. Longitudinal progress of the student participants and program impact will be tracked annually for 3 years after completion of the program through online surveys. Scholars will be asked to provide updated contact information, demographic information, and graduate school and/or career information, student learning outcome-related information, program impact information, and suggestions for program improvement.Many of the demographic and otherwise quantitative evaluation points (i.e., publication/presentation outputs, graduation rates, graduate school matriculation, career acquisition, etc.) will be gathered from archival data kept by this program, archival data available via the respective universities, and from the student in their post and longitudinal check-ins.