The Take Flight STEM Pathway is a partnership between Rice University, San Jacinto College and Lone Star College designed to increase access to and completion of four-year STEM degrees by high-achieving students from under-resourced backgrounds.
Started in 2022 by the Office of Strategic and Educational Initiatives in the Provost’s Office at Rice, the program is gaining momentum as it fosters closer relationships among Houston higher education institutions and helps transition hundreds of deserving students to four-year institutions in Houston and beyond.
Take Flight delivers on its mission in multiple ways: providing enriching experiences and events for students, removing obstacles to transfer, and building relationships between institutions and individual students. As the program has grown, it has provided a number of in-person and virtual events, increased access to summer research experiences for local community college students, and created first-of-their-kind articulation agreements between Rice and the partnering two-year colleges, guaranteeing that students receive transfer credit for certain courses when enrolling at Rice.
In September 2024, the Take Flight program held kickoff events at Lone Star College-University Park and San Jacinto College-Central to mark the start of the program’s third year. The events centered around a panel of Take Flight alumni, now enrolled at Rice, University of Houston, St. Thomas University and Sam Houston State University, who provided Take Flight students the opportunity to hear directly from their peers about how to make the most of the program. The panel also shared valuable insights on securing summer research placements and applying to four-year degree programs.
Now that 13 Take Flight alumni are enrolled at Rice, the program has launched the Take Flight Alumni Ambassador group to build community among Take Flight students at Rice and empower them to pay it forward to students at SJC and LSC.
Nic Reyes, a Take Flight alumnus from Lone Star College-Tomball and now a Rice senior, saw a need for additional preparation in mathematical logic for Take Flight transfer students and developed a series of eight virtual workshops to help fill that gap. These workshops ran in fall 2024 and engaged dozens of Take Flight students in topics that will set them up for a smoother transition into math courses upon transferring to a four-year university.
Similarly, Rice alumna Autumn Hildebrand saw a need for pre-med advising for community college students and pitched the idea to Take Flight program leaders. The program made the idea a reality by partnering with the Rice Premedical Society to host a series of four virtual information sessions that covered many of the topics Hildebrand wished she had as a hopeful pre-med student during her time at Lone Star College-Cypress Fairbanks.
Take Flight hosted the signature Take Flight On Campus Day at Rice in November, bringing more than 100 SJC and LSC students and 10 faculty and college leaders to Rice’s campus. The day included attending a class at Rice, a question‑and‑answer session with Rice peer academic advisers, sessions on applying for research experiences for undergraduates and transferring to four-year institutions, and a campus tour.
For more information about the program, visit https://stempathway.rice.edu.
Andy Osborn, Ed.M.
Program Manager of Educational Initiatives
Office of Strategic and Educational Initiatives — Provost’s Office