Report on student participants at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists

Abstract

The first meeting of African American physicists was held in 1973 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, with around 50 Black physicists in attendance. In 1977, this organization was formally established as the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) out of a need to address many concerns of African American physicists. During the ensuing years the Conference began to grow and was hosted by different institutions at various geographic locations. This year, the 2003 Annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and Black Physics Students was hosted by Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia during the weekend of February 12th-15th, 2003. This Conference brought together over 500 African American physics students and working physicists. Also attending were corporate and graduate school recruiters, administrators, professional society representatives and others concerned with the small representation of minorities in the field of physics. The organizers of the Conference contracted with the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics to conduct a formal evaluative study of the meeting, resulting in this report. The evaluation questionnaire was designed by the organizers of the NSBP conference with input from the Statistical Research Center's staff. It included questions on the students' backgrounds and demographic characteristics, physics research experience, career goals, challenges faced in their academic pursuits, and ratings of various aspects of the conference. The questionnaire was distributed at the conference when the students signed in. Of the 330 students who were registered, roughly 304 attended and were given the four-page questionnaire to complete. Responses were collected on the last night of the conference, with 172 (approximately 57%) returning completed questionnaires. This low response rate could be attributed in part to the fact that respondents were asked to provide possibly sensitive personal information. Student participants at the conference were asked to provide data on various aspects of their backgrounds and demographic characteristics. We found that there were significantly more undergraduate participants than graduate participants present at the conference (65% versus 35%). More than two-thirds of the undergraduate student attendees were upperclassmen. On the other hand, close to half of the graduate student attendees were still in the early stages of their graduate career. The overall median age was 23 years. The median age for undergraduates was 21, while for graduate students it was 29 years. We found no age difference between undergraduate males and females. However, there was an age difference between graduate male and female students. While among females the median age was 27, for graduate males the median age was 30 years. As shown, we see that women were well represented at this year's conference. The overall proportion of female student respondents was 41%. Among undergraduates, the proportion of females was 48%. While comparable data on all Black physics students nationwide are not available, this number bachelors recipients going to women, as reported by Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on AIP's most recent ''Enrollments and Degrees Study''. HBCUs confer more than half of all physics degrees by African-Americans in the US. The proportion of females among graduate student participants at the NSBP conference was 29%.