What follow-up strategies are most effective in yielding enrolled graduate minority students in my program or university?

The GradPortal Research Faculty Tutorial and the list of URLs of programs in Federal agencies that provide research training for minority undergraduates should help you to identify faculty at institutions that serve large numbers of minority students who are engaged in training students for graduate programs. These faculty will have an excellent understanding of the students in their programs and will be very qualified to match their students with your research program.

Therefore, one effective recruiting strategy is to establish contact with these faculty and explain your research program to them. In approaching the faculty who are the Principal Investigators on these minority programs, the following suggestions may be useful:

Faculty are very protective of the students they have taught or mentored for a number of years so that they will be looking for graduate programs which have a track record of success with minority students.
Maintaining contact with faculty over a period of years can be useful and sometimes necessary if your program has little history of success with graduating minority students.
Inviting faculty to visit your campus and see your research program could help to inform them and therefore help inform their students in more detail about your program.
Personal contacts are always more effective than printed material. Telephone calls are not as good as personal visits but are better than a letter, especially a form letter.

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