GEOPAths-UP: Recruiting and Retaining Nongeoscience Minority STEM Majors for Geoscience Service Learning and for the Geoscience Workforce II

There is a preponderance of recent studies that sound the alarm concerning the nation’s STEM workforce in general and its geoscience workforce in particular. These studies highlight: 1) the importance of STEM to the nation’s well-being, security, and global competitiveness; 2) the need for equity, access, increased enrollment, and diversity in STEM disciplines; and 3) the current and projected increase in STEM workforce shortage. The sustained capacity of the current and future STEM workforce to meet the nation’s scientific and technological needs is threatened by a sharp decline in the number of available STEM professionals. This project seeks to help in ameliorating the nation’s geoscience plight by creating a year-round geoscience workforce preparation, geoscience service learning, and geoscience career mentoring program for non-geoscience STEM students who come from communities that have been structurally excluded in STEM. The overall goal of the program is to construct an innovative, viable, and sustainable pathway to the geoscience workforce by tapping into a non-traditional and diverse pool of students. The program has added values in that it not only replenishes the geoscience workforce, but it also supports geoscience education, promotes diversity and inclusion, and benefits society as a whole by producing geoscience literate citizens. The program is designed to achieve the following two primary goals: 1) to broaden the geoscience workforce pathway for non-geoscience minority STEM majors; and 2) to create a multi-sector geoscience workforce development infrastructure. The objectives of the first goal are delineated in the following EPA–E theme of the geoscience transitional workforce program: EXPOSURE: Expose undergraduate seniors to the geosciences, PREPARATION: Provide undergraduate seniors with critical geoscience workforce skills and professional networks, APPRENTICESHIP: Engage undergraduate seniors in meaningful real-world, service and experiential learning via geoscience applications, and EXPERIENCE: Culminate into/with a geoscience internship-workforce experience. The objectives of the second goal are associated with the Apprenticeship component above: a) Create a student-faculty-industry paradigm of mentoring for the geoscience workforce; b) Create a professional workforce development structure among participating organizations, c) Design peer-to-peer mentoring support structures, and d) Engage students in geoscience service-learning that provides participants with relevant, active-learning, neighborhood-scale geoscience activities that engage and empower the local community by raising awareness to the environment and by assisting in developing citizen scientists. 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.