ASU professor Bianca Bernstein poses for a portrait on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014. CareerWISE serves as a reliable mentor to women in STEM fields by preparing them for challenges they will face in the field. (Photo by Andrew Ybanez)ASU’s CareerWISE online resiliency training resource is helping to provide women in male-dominant STEM fields with a reliable mentor to help them handle the challenges they will face during their work in the field.
Bianca Bernstein, ASU professor and project leader of CareerWise, said the online program is meant to simulate a real-life mentor by giving them challenges and “choose your own adventure” situations.
“It is a coaching type of online training that aims to give women many of the benefits that a mentor might provide them,” she said.
Bernstein said the program was launched when ASU received two large grants from the National Science Foundation. The initial grant was awarded in 2006 and the first online training session was held in November 2010.
The biggest focus of the online resource is to prepare women for future challenges in STEM fields, she said.
“Women have extra challenges in science and engineering fields and this resource will help them be able to recognize and handle those challenges so they will be more confident when they arise again in the future,” Bernstein said.
However, Bernstein said CareerWISE is different than other online programs because it is backed up by research.
“This program, which focuses on interpersonal skills and uses an interactive simulator, has a strong research base because we’ve studied the effect of women using it on their learning outcomes,” she said. “We have found very strong results for its success.”
Looking ahead, she said the University wants to try to look at the resource’s success rate for women working professionally in STEM fields.
“We want to try and look beyond the grading scale to see if our online training benefits the performance of women in the field,” Bernstein said.
Co-Principal Investigator Jennifer Bekki said the women who are graduate students in STEM fields regularly comment on the usefulness of the materials and resources CareerWISE offers.
“Resilience training is designed to strengthen the skills necessary to persist in spite of difficulties and discouragements that take place during a normal trajectory throughout graduate school,” she said.
Although there has not been much difficulty throughout the process, she said the team’s main focus is getting the word out to women who they hope will use and benefit from it.
“CareerWISE has been very fortunate to have benefited from the commitment of time and expertise from a large team of researchers and research study participants,” Bekki said. “After women get on the site, they typically have no trouble seeing how the material on there would be useful and relevant to them.”
Amy Dawson, a graduate student and research assistant on CareerWISE, said her work with the resource is fulfilling because she knows women benefit greatly from it.
She talked to a focus group of graduate STEM women who gave their valuable feedback regarding the online resource.
“It was the first time I had sat down and spoken with women who used the program and benefited from it,” Dawson said. “It was an amazing thing to hear these women talk about the different sections of the website and how they were applicable to their experiences.”
Kerrie-Ann Wilkins, who is one of the lead research assistants for CareerWISE, said the impact of the website can be seen with the valuable skills women gain from using the website.
“We have done multiple research studies to examine the effectiveness of the website and they have demonstrated that participation in the CareerWISE site can significantly build interpersonal and problem-solving skills,” she said.
Reach the reporter at Justin.Toscano@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @justintoscano3.
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