The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), a consortium of over 110 research universities and institutions dedicated to monitoring the Earth and exploring its interior through the collection and distribution of seismological data, will provide 12 undergraduate students with research experiences as part of its 9-11 week internship program. Students will have the opportunity to work with leaders in seismological research, to travel to exotic sites for fieldwork, and to produce research products worthy of presentation at large professional conferences. Given the Consortium's distributed nature, the program employs an approach that blends mature telecommunications technology and recent research on distance learning to achieve the spirit of a traditional REU site. The resulting blended REU model will create novel opportunities for interns to communicate with one another to more fully develop and express their understanding of the process of research. Students will also receive consistent professional development throughout the internship, and connect both in person and via technology to create and maintain a cohort experience while benefiting from the resources of the IRIS Consortium.
This REU model has the opportunity to contribute to the growing body of knowledge regarding the application of telecommunications for distance learning, community building and the implementation of the skills associated with metacognition. The success, documentation and dissemination of this model will enable other organizations to apply geographically distributed resources to the development of their human capital. Additionally, this project presents an opportunity to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the study of seismology. IRIS continues to work closely with minority professional organizations to raise awareness of the study of seismology as a potential career path. A key mechanism for achieving this goal lies in creating personal connections between the program and potential applicants through a lecture series that targets students in physics classes at minority serving institutions and features alumni of the internship program that are advanced PhD students.
The site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.
Through this award, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), a consortium of over 110 research universities and institutions dedicated to monitoring the Earth and exploring its interior through the collection and distribution of seismological data, has provided 43 undergraduate students with in-depth seismological research experiences. Sixty percent of these students were female and twelve percent were ethnic or racial minorities that are underrepresented in science. This 9 - 11 week program bonds the interns in supportive learning communities while offering supportive mentoring opportunities. All interns began their summer experiences by participating in an intensive, in-person, week-long preparatory course. Next, interns traveled to their summer placements to work with leaders in seismological research, conduct fieldwork, both within and outside the U.S, and produce research products worthy of presentation at large professional conferences. Finally, the culmination of each student’s internship experience was the opportunity to present the results of their summer research at a professional meeting (in most cases the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union). Research projects ranged across a spectrum of seismologic topics, from determining Earth’s structure from the lowermost Mantle to near-surface fault zones, to understanding the faulting process in both large and small earthquakes. The overarching goal of this program was to encourage more students, representing a more diverse population to choose careers in Earth science. The success of this goal was measured through longitudinal tracking of the program’s alumni. While some of the students who participated in the program are still completing their undergraduate degrees, a 2011 survey of all of the alumni of IRIS’s REU site (both within this award period and 3 years prior), achieved a response rate of 93%, and found that 90% of the participants who had completed their undergraduate degrees (37 of the 41) were either pursuing an advanced degree or employed in a STEM field. A unique aspect of this internship program was that the participants were geographically distributed from one another during the research phase of their summer, with the students conducting their research at a total of 36 institutions. To overcome this distance while fostering meaningful social and academic relationships among the group, information and communication technologies (ICT) and specialized programming were employed. This included training and coaching in the use of ICT for the purpose of collaboration and group cohesion. Both the programming and the technologies used to connect students evolved over the course of the program. As a result the program became much more effective at connecting students to one another in a meaningful way. For example, IRIS interns who agreed or strongly agreed that they were connected to the other IRIS interns in a beneficial way has steadily increased from 56% to 80% during the performance period of the award.
