A group of professors at Drury University have teamed up with the National Science Foundation to try to encourage more young people to prepare for math and science careers.

According to KSFX-TV in Springfield, Missouri, the NSF provided Drury with a $360,000 grant to find new ways to attract more students into these fields, which are increasingly dominated by students from India and Asian countries.

One freshman at the university, Bekka Hardman, told the TV station that she finds math and science fascinating, which sometimes draws strange looks from her friends. "I think this is so interesting and this is what I want to do with the rest of my life," she was quoted as saying.

Hardman also said that some students who do set out for math and science careers can end up transferring to other majors because they find it frustrating. The station cited a statistic where one in four college students say they intend to study such fields, but only half of them end up graduating from these programs.

A recent test of fourth graders in various countries underscores the issue. American students as a whole placed eleventh in the global testing, even as U.S. companies continue to seek out workers with sophisticated technical and math skills. In what may be the brightest spot on the test, fourth graders from Massachusetts ended up testing far ahead of the rest of the nation, ranking alongside top science countries like Singapore and Taiwan.