OEDG Planning Workshop to establish URECAS: Unique Research Experiences for two-year College faculty And Students

American Geophysical Union, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

In this planning effort, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) will lay the foundations for developing the Unique Research Experiences for two-year College faculty And Students (URECAS) program, which is intended to support Earth and space science faculty at two-year colleges as they engage their undergraduate students in research activities. AGU is convening a two-day workshop with 30 attendees to increase awareness about existing opportunities for summer research experiences for undergraduates, identify best practices for engaging two-year college students in research, and consider strategies for overcoming some of the barriers to success. The ultimate goal of this effort is to establish a distributed community of two-year college instructors engaged in geoscience research and develop a strategic plan for new programs that help undergraduate students successfully transition between two-year and four-year programs in the geosciences. Many students who attend two-year colleges come from underrepresented communities in STEM disciplines; as such, this project directly supports the NSF and GEO Directorate goals of broadening participation in STEM disciplines, in general, and in the geosciences, specifically.