Working Group 1 – Session 3 (Saturday, January 11, 2014)
Recruitment of Diversity Students
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Aging white population
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Emerging Hispanic population
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Diversity in who we are hiring
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Proactive in diverse graduate student recruitment
The marketing issue: how do we advertise to diverse minorities?
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How can we make it okay for them to seek non-traditional jobs (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc) o Cultural taboos o Stay close to home
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Students don’t know any of us
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They don’t know the language, the geography (e.g. “the field”) o Don’t advertise the field aspect o Promote lab positions
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Non-western/non-european approaches to science
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Giving back to one’s community
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Promote high-paying jobs in STEM careers
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Peer-pressure
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Hit ‘em early (elementary) and often (middle school, high school)
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Grandparents University
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Get parents involved
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Community leaders o Sports coaches o Pastors & religious leaders o Tribal leaders o Community role models
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Focus on relevant environmental issues (where science meets social justice)
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Get diversity/minority speakers to come in and give talks revolving around environmental issues
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REUs focused on underrepresented students in geosciences (maybe over-tapped resource)
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Graduate student 101 mentoring experiences
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Coordinate campus visits o Planetariums o Science Saturdays o Departmental outreach to schools, scouts o Summer STEM camps o Science in the Parks o Open house
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Meet with incoming potential majors
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Broader Impacts from NSF projects involving K-12 students
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Allow students to feel a connection to our schools/departments as they are selecting universities o They need to be able to envision themselves there. o Urban students may be more localized and/or limited to where they can go
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Place-based geology (urban, local, land use, ground water
Effective to graduates

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Scalable, sustainable, self-propagating
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Barriers to recruitment
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Time, energy
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Admissions departments
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Family socioeconomic factors
Session 3 (cont.) – Sunday, January 12, 2014
What did we NOT talk about in this meeting that are potential emerging issues?
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Hybrid, flipped, non-traditional lectures
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Industry panel, keynote speaker from AAPG, etc. o Disconnect between faculty and industry o Students/applicants are missing key skills (landform ID, mapping) that industry looks for o Core competencies vary across industry disciplines
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Where do we fit into the globalization of industry, oil, environmental, conservation companies? o Do we have international skills? o International industry is limited to training foreign nationals, and then leaving. o Semester abroad, international meetings, international exposure o Internships abroad o 60+% of SEG are internationals
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Emerging fields in our departments and curriculums o Water o Climate change/mitigation o Alternative energies o Disaster resilience o Space exploration, planetary geology, remote sensing
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More use of crowd sourcing for gathering data
Recommendations, next steps
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Things that will help the community to advance/evolve o Emphasis on emerging fields at the undergrad level o Mitigation – What is the role of the geosciences? o Public outreach, conveying information to politicians, communities
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Interdisciplinary teams o Project-based curriculum involving multidisciplinary teams
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Change perspective toward interdisciplinary studies, less in traditional geology core curriculum o Course content including real world problems, and problems of the future o Reinforces general/soft skills discussed Day 1 o Potential problem: losing depth of knowledge of traditional curriculum (min/pet, sed/strat) in exchange for breadth of earth systems curriculum
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Encourage national movement toward including emerging challenges into established/traditional curriculum o Pared down core

o Upper-level courses that are more transdisciplinary o Upper-level students take environmental ethics course, economics, etc.
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Encourage courses tag-team taught by geologist and biologist/economist/meteorologist/etc.