GP-EXTRA: Expanding an Innovative Pathway to Replenish the Geoscience Workforce with Underrepresented Minority Non-Geoscience STEM Majors

Cuny New York City College Of Technology, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) seeks to expand and to sustain a year-round geoscience workforce preparation and geoscience career mentoring program for non-geoscience minority STEM students beginning at the critical juncture of their junior or senior year. The overall goal of the program is to create a sustainable pathway to the dwindling geoscience workforce by tapping into this non-traditional pool of students. Eleven students will be recruited each year to participate in the structured geoscience workforce model program that consists of geoscience - Exposure, Preparation, Apprenticeship, and Experience. The initiative will bring together City Tech, Medgar Evers College and federal, local, and private geoscience industry partners that include: NYC Department of Environmental Protection, NYC Department of Transportation, NYC Emergency Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cary Institute, and Partner Engineering and Science. City Tech and its partners will collaborate to achieve the following objectives: 1) create pathways for non-geoscience STEM majors to pursue careers in the geosciences; 2) provide hands-on geoscience training via the use of geoscience instrumentation, models, and data sets; and 3) engage students in transformative geoscience internship programs. The proposed activities combine year-long geoscience workforce experiences with multi-tiered mentoring, industry support systems, and a robust geoscience networking community to produce holistic and engaging stimuli for the workforce development of the participants. The scientific, educational, and geoscience workforce value of this project derives from two main sources: 1) a focus on the transfer of learning from STEM knowledge to real-world geoscience problems, operations, and workforce development, and 2) the expertise of geoscience practitioners at federal, local, and private facilities, all of whom are highly trained geoscience professionals. This project at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) seeks to expand and to sustain a year-round geoscience workforce preparation and geoscience career mentoring program for non-geoscience minority STEM students beginning at the critical juncture of their junior or senior year. The overall goal of the program is to create a sustainable pathway to the dwindling geoscience workforce by tapping into this non-traditional pool of students. Eleven students will be recruited each year to participate in the structured geoscience workforce model program that consists of geoscience - Exposure, Preparation, Apprenticeship, and Experience. The expectation through this initiative will be that many underrepresented minority (URM) STEM students who would otherwise not pursue a geoscience career may now choose to follow a geoscience career that could not only lead to lucrative jobs, but could also help to ameliorate the nation's grave geoscience workforce dilemma. A multi-sector geoscience workforce development infrastructure will then be developed. To address the project's main research enquiries, the program was designed with the following goals and objectives: Goal 1: To broaden the geoscience workforce pathway for non-geoscience minority STEM majors; Goal 2: To create a multi-sector geoscience workforce development infrastructure. Each component of the program: Exposure, Preparation, Apprenticeship, and Experience will be evaluated individually. Additionally, surveys, focus groups, and pre-post geoscience knowledge and laboratory tests will be used for both formative and summative assessments of the program. 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.