Nearly half of students in STEM disciplines begin their college careers at community colleges, which all too often have limited resources, especially with regard to instrumentation. Thus, community college students may not have hands-on experience with modern instrumentation, leaving them at a disadvantage when they transfer to four-year schools. Collaborations with four-year institutions are one possible solution, but collaborative models where one institution buys a large bench-top instrument to share with other institutions are problematic. Bringing large numbers of students to another institution is logistically difficult over the long term, and web-based interfaces require someone at the host institution to do the sample prep and loading, meaning the students at the other end of the web interface lose out on a lot of the hands-on experience. This leaves the host institution as the primary beneficiary of the grant, with the other institutions playing a secondary role, at best. Portable instruments, however, allow for collaborative projects that truly benefit all institutions. Because the instruments can be brought to each participating institution, logistical issues of transporting students are eliminated, and all students get full use of the instrument. The project described in this talk is an NSF-IUSE funded collaboration between Hood College, Mount Saint Mary's University, and Frederick Community College: two small, four-year schools and a community college. The project involved purchasing four portable instruments (XRF, Raman, FT-IR, and UV-Vis spectrometers) that are shared between the three institutions. This talk will cover the project so far, but it will focus on the challenges and lessons learned in putting together and conducting a multi-institution shared instrumentation grant, especially with a community college as an equal partner. Working with community colleges presents a number of challenges, since they often have little experience obtaining scientific grants, but it greatly increases the grant’s impact and effectiveness.

Expanding instrument access through collaborative sharing of portable instrumentation

251st National Meeting (2016)

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