This program has been supported by the NSF S-STEM program, from January 2020 to December 2025.  

We provide holistic support for financially disadvantaged students in the 4+1 (BS/MS) program leading to the MS degree in Scientific Computing and Applied Mathematics offered by the Department of Applied Mathematics at UC Santa Cruz. Each scholar is supported for 2 years. 

Holistic support includes

• Scholarship support
• Quarterly meetings with an academic advisor (or more if needed)
• Quarterly meetings with a personal counselor (or more if needed)
• Targeted interventions when needed, to help students in any way they may need
• Professional development workshops and general career advising 

Over the past 5 years, the program has successfully graduated 22 students with both BS and MS (with 5 more in the program) and one student from the BS only. Thanks to the holistic help provided to the scholars, their degree completion rate is much higher than other students, with a time-to-degree that is shorter.

The NSF proposal can be found here,

Holistic advising is a developmental process that focuses on the “whole” student. It requires advisors to effectively communicate with students in assessing their goals by encouraging students to take responsibility for their own progress and success. A holistic approach meets students where they are, addresses their individual needs, leverages their strengths, and focuses on student development and learning. The advising team is composed of a personal counselor, and an academic advisor. The team meets once a week to discuss individual student cases, to make sure any item that needs to be addressed is dealt with rapidly.

Personal Counseling: Students meet with an EOP STEM Counselor (Leydi Cortes) every quarter for 30-min, or as often as needed. Each meeting begins with a general check-in to build rapport, this may include talking about their weekend, a recent break or what happened in their lives that week. The counselor then transitions into asking if there is a specific item they want to focus on, ensuring time sensitive items are addressed. The counselor then goes through a list of open-ended questions, guided by the holistic advising framework. Below is a list of questions that the counselor uses to guide conversation across key areas. Additionally, the counselor refers students to appropriate campus resources as needed and escalates cases when additional support is required.

• Academics: How are classes going so far? What's your favorite class this quarter? What's your most challenging class so far? What exams or projects are coming up? What are some ways you have been preparing for your exam? What else can you do to prepare for them? Who are key people that support you? What are some items you need to prioritize this week?
• Self-Care/Wellbeing: What are you looking forward to after your exam or project? How do you balance your time studying, work, and taking breaks? Do you have access to well-balanced meals? Tell me about your living situation? How's your sleeping schedule
• Finances: Did you receive your financial aid and Next Gen SAM scholarship this quarter? Are you feeling financially stable this quarter?
• Career: Have you connected with Career Success this academic year? When was the last time you updated your resume?

Academic advising: Students meet individually with a dedicated academic adviser (PI Garaud) every quarter for 30 min at a minimum, and often more as needed. During each meeting,

• the adviser reviews the student's progress in their degree program, and a plan for the next quarter is made. Particular attention is paid to ensure that the plan will allow the student to graduate in the normative time, with the strongest possible academic record.
• if there are difficulties encountered in some courses, student and advisor will discuss strategies to overcome them. 
• at appropriate times in the academic calendar, the advisor will review the student's progress in  applying to internships for the summer / to PhD programs / to post-graduation jobs, and will make recommendations as needed.
• if a student has administrative difficulties, or problems with a course instructor, or with their thesis advisor, the advisor acts as an advocate to ensure these difficulties are resolved. 

Workshops are held multiple times every quarter to ensure that the students have the information they need at the right time in their degree program, in preparation for their future careers. PDFs of the workshops slides can be found here for most of the workshops, except the 'impostor syndrome' workshop and the 'hopes and fears for graduate school' workshop, which are meant to be open discussions rather than presentations.

The workshop calendar is generally as follows:

Fall quarter:

• Transitioning to graduate school, and overcoming the impostor syndrome (for BS and MS students)
• How to apply to PhD programs (for MS students)
• How to find and apply to internships (for BS students)

Winter quarter:

• How to find jobs (for BS and MS students)
• How to apply to jobs (for BS and MS students)

Spring quarter:

• Alumni panel (for all)
• The hopes and fears for graduate school (for BS and MS students)

Since the launch of the Next Gen SAM program, we have seen a dramatic improvement of the graduation rates and time-to-degree for SAM scholars compared with the control group (composed of students in the UCSC 4+1 BS to MS program who are not in the SAM program).

The following table compares these outcomes (as of July 1st, 2025):

Transfer = students who joined UCSC as undergraduate transfers; Continuing = students who joined UCSC as frosh. 

In addition, we note that almost all SAMs have completed their BS degree in normative time (2 yrs for undergraduate transfers, and 4 years for continuing students), and their MS degree in less than 1 yr, resulting in significant financial savings for the student.

The 5th-year program evaluation report is available here. It was created by evaluator Dr. Elizabeth Gonzalez, based on individual interviews with program alumni, in December 2024. The final program evaluation report will be published in December 2025.