Many college STEM majors are unaware of the multitude of geoscience careers available to them. This particularly applies to students from rural areas who are the first in their family to attend college. These students are often academically gifted, but feel that they have to enter the workforce directly upon graduating with a BS degree, often due to financial hardship. This short-circuits these students' ability to participate in more intellectually demanding, rewarding, and lucrative geoscience careers, and limits the potential for universities to meet the projected future demands for the nation's geoscience workforce. To address this issue, the RiGs (Road maps into the Geosciences) summer program will form a multi-institutional alliance among the Missouri University of Science and Technology (S&T), Southern Utah University, Kutztown University (Pennsylvania), state/federal agencies in Missouri, and the private sector. The goal of RiGs is to (i) facilitate exposure of financially challenged STEM students from rural areas, at minimal to zero costs, to a wide array of geoscience career pathways, and (ii) to highlight the educational tracks and professional skills necessary to pursue those tracks. The RiGs program will provide an academic and professional development opportunity for financially challenged undergraduate students that these students would normally forego, thus serving as a pilot for increasing the economic competitiveness of the U.S. through rural workforce development.
RiGs (Road maps into the Geosciences) will establish a recurring two-month summer program on the Missouri S&T campus that will help undergraduate students to successfully transition into the post-baccalaureate geoscience workforce. The focus is to immerse the students into an active research and/or private sector work environment that will allow them to develop academic and professional skills typically not taught in the classroom. Students will learn these skills through an Introduction to Geoscience Research Methodologies class, a mentored research project or job shadowing at state/federal agencies in Missouri, and a series of extracurricular activities. The Introduction to Geoscience Research Methodologies class is designed to provide context for the active, hands-on learning of practical skills applicable to geoscience research. As part of individual research projects, the students will be paired with Missouri S&T graduate students to guarantee full immersion into an active graduate research environment (i.e., the "Grad School Experience"). Job shadowing at the US Geological Survey, the US Forest Service, and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources will provide participating students with unique insight into the daily life of a professional geoscientist, which will be complemented by a career day at the Doe Run lead mining company in Missouri. Furthermore, extracurricular activities throughout the summer program (team building exercises, mock job interviews, oral presentation skill development) will help students acquire the necessary professional and social skills for a successful geoscience career.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
