10/7/2025 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
This past August, MechSE participated for the first time in the Academic Redshirt in Science and Engineering (ARISE) summer bridge program.
ARISE aims to provide support to students from low-resourced or low-access backgrounds who show strong engineering potential. The program supports admitted students throughout their entire college career. In alignment with the college’s mission to foster a supportive environment for all members of the university community, the program is open to all eligible students regardless of race, color or national origin.
Stephanie Ott-Monsivais, Director of Undergraduate Programs for MechSE, worked with ARISE Senior Program Coordinator Aldo Montagner to bring the bridge—a two-week program in which incoming freshmen engineering students move to campus, attend workshops, and collaborate on a series of projects—to MechSE’s space.
“Students arrive on campus early and have the chance to connect with advisors, current students, and faculty in their areas of interest,” Ott-Monsivais said of the summer bridge. “Our goal was to spark excitement and engagement from the start.”
Ott-Monsivais developed activities for the bridge’s Motion section, which encompassed aerospace, industrial & enterprise systems, and mechanical science & engineering disciplines. One highlight was a balsa wood glider activity, adapted from a project originally developed by Aerospace Teaching Assistant Professor Elle Wroblewski. Students worked both independently and as a team to optimize the glider’s payload according to specific criteria, and construct a launcher to fly it—tasks that were designed to highlight each discipline. During the two weeks, students in Motion attended lectures in Sidney Lu MEB and worked on their projects in the Jackson Innovation Studio. Ott-Monsivais also led the students in business planning and professional development discussions.
“This experience was very eye-opening for the students,” she said. “Not only were many beginning to realize what they wanted to do, but several also discovered that the major they were interested in was different from what they expected. They learned what they liked and what they didn’t, a process that would have taken much longer without this opportunity.”
Indeed, one of the benefits of the summer bridge is to expose students to authentic engineering content.
“We find that most students end up changing their mind about their original major, and this is primarily because they’ve been exposed to very little throughout high school,” Montagner said. “We have 21 different majors here in The Grainger College of Engineering, but most students have been exposed to mechanical, computer science, and maybe some electrical or civil. We really focus on major exploration in [ARISE students’] first year.”
Students who are admitted to ARISE are then admitted to the college pending their full participation in the program. ARISE students come to campus as part of the engineering undeclared program and then apply for their discipline during their sophomore year. Founded in 2016, the program has admitted 211 scholars so far from 109 high schools across Illinois.
“It’s truly rewarding when we get to see [students] grow from day one of their first semester into that day when they’re crossing the stage,” Montagner said. “They seem like two completely different people because of all the growth that has happened throughout the process. I think a lot of the impact we have is the community support that gives them that sense of belonging that they need to succeed in engineering.”
Historically, ARISE had enough funding to support 25 students each year. In 2023, Season 7 (which is what ARISE students call their cohort) participated in a summer bridge hosted by the Illinois Scholars Program. In 2024, ARISE garnered additional funding and was able to admit 54 students to Season 8, which prompted the development of its own summer bridge.
This year, with a whopping 103 students admitted to Season 9, the team split the summer bridge into three sections—alongside Motion, these included Nature, which encompassed civil & environmental engineering (CEE), bioengineering, and chemical engineering, and Information, which encompassed electrical & computer engineering (ECE) and computer science. CEE Teaching Assistant Professor Ernest-John Ignacio and ECE PhD candidate Corey Snyder led each of these sections, respectively.
Regardless of section, all participants attended workshops for math foundations (taught by Montagner and fellow program coordinator Brenna Sposito) and critical thinking, which mimic a college discussion section and lecture, respectively. The projects workshop, which mimics a college laboratory section, culminated in final presentations.
“The summer bridge allowed us to have that sense of knowing that we always have someone to go to, because we only had each other for those first two weeks,” said Season 8 sophomore Andrea Martinez, who helped facilitate the Motion section. “It gives you a little boost before the semester starts, and lets you get accustomed to the pace and workload.”
Fellow facilitator and current systems engineering and design junior Erik Toledo, who joined ARISE in Season 5, echoed this sentiment. “The summer bridge is an empowering experience because it gives students the ability to get to know college,” he said. “It gives students the support, connections, and relationships needed to succeed in school.”
Both students were motivated by their own experiences in ARISE to become more involved as facilitators and mentors.
“It was so special for me to be on a first-name basis with so many staff members—they know my story, my struggles and my worries, and they care,” Martinez said of her bridge experience. “It really helped me realize that I’m in college and maybe I got here by myself, but now that I’m here, I am no longer by myself. I have the ARISE program and everything that ARISE has connected me to, and I feel like that’s the main reason I’ve had such a wonderful experience in my first year and a half of college.”
“Having a program that not only supports academic success but also personal success is something that helped me get through a lot of challenges that I was going through,” Toledo said. “For me, [facilitating] was a way to give back to the community. I learned a lot during my first couple of years, and I wanted to share that experience to help other students have a good transition.”
The experience also helped prepare him for his role this semester as an engineering learning assistant (ELA). In interacting with bridge participants, Toledo appreciated the quality of their project work.
“They were very creative in terms of their solutions,” he said. “The thing that impressed me the most was how many different solutions they were able to achieve with the same material.”
“These are some of the strongest students that have graduated from engineering,” Montagner said of ARISE cohorts. “We’ve had Knights of St. Patrick, members of the homecoming court, presidents of RSOs, students who end up going to graduate school. They are very involved in our community, they give back to our college programs, and they end up being mentors or tutors for others.”