It has long been widely recognized that there is a shortage of students successfully pursuing STEM degrees and careers. The impending shortage is particularly acute for careers in the geosciences, where it is anticipated there will be a deficit of 90,000 professionals by the year 2024. There are multiple reasons for this, but paramount among them is the aging out of professional geoscientists through retirements, and low awareness of geoscience career opportunities and financial opportunities among college freshman because rigorous geology courses are not commonly taught in secondary schools. Yet, students who discover a geoscience major at the university have very high satisfaction with their degree and the prospects of careers in the management of natural resources and mitigation of human impacts on the environment. Project EXPLORES (EXPLOration of Recruitment of Earth Scientists) is looking to address many of these issues through a combination of recruitment, curricular changes in a course taken by nearly all STEM majors at Northern Arizona University (NAU), near-peer and research mentoring, career advising, and a welcoming social and educational environment in the Geology Program. The project aims for at least an average 10% growth per year in the number of new students entering the geology major at NAU.
Project EXPLORES takes multiple actions to improve student understanding of the geology major and career opportunities in the geosciences. The basis of our project is a collaboration among faculty from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Sustainability to develop several new geoscience-focused labs in a chemistry foundational course taken by 2000 STEM majors each year, including 30-40% of students from underrepresented groups. The labs will expose early-career STEM majors to how geoscientists use chemistry to quantify and understand changes in the Earth system. After the project ends the new labs will be institutionalized as a permanent part of the Chemistry curriculum.
To those students who show interest in the geoscience major the project will offer experiences that build their exposure to the major and careers after graduation. The experiences include:pairing geology undergraduate peer mentors (Geoscience Ambassadors) with prospective students to provide information about the geology major and their experiences in classes and with faculty; leading day-long field trips to local, spectacular geologic settings so prospective majors can learn how geoscientists incorporate experiential learning into classes; inviting career geoscience professionals to talk about their career paths and opportunities, as well as provide advice about which courses of study to pursue within the major; providing prospective majors and their research mentors stipends to conduct authentic research in one of our cutting-edge research groups that include climate science, geochemistry, geophysics, tectonics, and biogeoscience. Research mentors comprising graduate students and faculty will receive multi-day training on effective mentoring practices.
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.
