Seventeen Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, and Information Technology students have been awarded a four-year up to $10,000 per year scholarship as part of the Department’s NSF S-STEM Flit-GAP project. The scholarships are part of a $5 million, five-year grant from NSF awarded to USF, UCF, and FIU in support of the collaborative Florida IT Graduation Attainment Pathways (Flit-GAP) project. CSE Professor Ken Christensen is the USF lead for the project. FIU is the lead partner and is responsible for educational research, project administration, and reporting.
The Flit-GAP project aims to recruit, retain, and guide to success (graduate and help find a professional pathway) academically talented, financially challenged students in the computing disciplines. Flit-GAP will impact 150 scholars (50 at USF), recruited at the junior-level. Flit-GAP’s focus is on (1) creating a hybrid (physical-virtual) learning community that spans the three institutions, and (2) offering professional pathway experiences (research, internship, entrepreneurship) to each of its scholars, reflecting the scholar’s interest to pursue graduate studies, work for industry/government, or work for a small company/start own business, upon graduation. Flit-GAP builds on a previously awarded Flit-Path NSF S-STEM project. To date, the two NSF S-STEM projects – Flit-Path and Flit-GAP – have granted scholarships to 220 CSE students over 7 years, totaling more than $1.5 million.
The students awarded the scholarship are in order as shown below, Aaron Acevedo, Adam Mansour, Adelitta Stanton, Adrian Lozda, Alexander Huaman, Blake McFarlane, Celina Vo, Daishak Patel, Fatemah Elsewaky, Hassan Najam, Humayra Afreen, Mutammim Alom, Robert Garcia, Sophia Joubert, Sumaiya Lana, Tyler Eng, and Yaroslav Voryk.