Research Symposium

BIO

Mellina Fair is a second-year senior at FSU double-majoring in Criminology & Psychology. She is a first-generation college student from Melbourne, FL and a proud CARE 2024 Alumni! Coming from a single-parent household has fueled her passion for her 2025-2026 UROP Research project on proper funding and opportunity for student-parent's on campus. Apart from her passion for justice and equality, her long-term goal is to work in behavioral analysis within the F.B.I.

Bridging Academics & Parenthood: A Data-Informed Support Program for FSU Student Parents

Abstract

We can’t do anything if we don’t know, and if we know and decide to not do anything, we can’t call ourselves inclusive. Our approach to this problem was very simple. We curated a detailed survey to be sent out to student-parents the department of early childcare and learning program already knew about and some outside of that. We received more feedback than we expected, learning that most of the survey takers were graduate students, about 10% of them were attending FSU on a temporary student VISA, majority were female, the age range was 17-40+, all of them had less than 4 children whom all of which were living with them currently, and the majority were white. This is only a fraction of the information we gained, but it was all so helpful in getting to the root of where to focus our attention to better aid our student parent community at FSU.

Keywords: Student-parent, Childcare, Resources