Community Success

MCDB Welcomes Everyone.

MCDB is strongly committed to promoting the success for all students, staff, and faculty at CU. We understand that excellence is only achieved by lifting up the entire community, and like many other university STEM departments, we recognize that we must do better. We are working to promote excellence for the entire research community, making sure everyone feels welcome and that no one is subjected to discrimination or harassment of any kind.Ìý

MCDB students and faculty are strongly committed to improving STEM culture and promoting inclusive excellence within and outside the department. To address the inequities in science, MCDB is committed to recruiting, training, and retaining graduate students from all backgrounds. At the graduate level, specific actions taken to begin to improve MCDB’s makeup include:

  • Participation in the Colorado Advantage program
  • The removal of the GRE testing requirement from our application
  • A lower threshold of GPA cutoff of 2.75 for program entry
  • Graduate program application fee waiver for those who qualify

Each of these actions is justified by scientific literature that indicates that these items presented unfair barriers to many talented students coming from underserved communities.Ìý

Recent and ongoing structural changes within the community of MCDB to support underserved peoples upon entry into and throughout the program include:

  • Engagement of faculty in the to improve the training experience of ALL graduate students and postdocs, with a specific focus on understanding the perspective of people from different backgrounds
  • Bolster existing mentorship programs including SMART and STEM Routes with increased faculty engagement and support
  • Development of new Bridge programs to recruit students to MCDB undergraduate and graduate programs, in partnership with institutions like Metro State University in Denver
  • Strengthen and expand departmental connections with other campus communities by establishing departmental student liaisons for campus-level graduate student resources
  • Invitations to faculties with a mentorship component in collaboration with
  • An anonymous hotline to report incidents or issues with the department climate

Getting Involved

MCDB graduate students have volunteered to act as liaisons for various community organizations on campus. Please see our Graduate Student »Æ¹ÏÊÓƵ webpage to learn more about other resources and communities on campus. The graduate school also has a list of community resources that our graduate students are encouraged to participate in.Ìý

Many of the faculty, staff, and students from MCDB actively participate in programs to recruit Ìýundergraduates into research, including:

STEM Routes: An initiative that brings undergraduate students into labs to do research and work with graduate student mentors

The CU Boulder Summer Multicultural Access to Research Training

The Colorado Advantage Program

The Pre-Collegiate Development program

Miramonte Arts & Sciences ProgramÌý

CU Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Communit