UNDERSTANDING THE EXISTING ROLE OF TRADITIONAL FIELD COURSES IN THE EARTH SCIENCES: INSIGHTS FROM THE NAGT/USGS INTERNSHIP PROGRAM AND THE BROADER COMMUNITY

Based on feedback from field camp instructors, faculty, students, and employers in a wide array of government and industry, the “traditional” field camp still has a place in the modern world. The critical skills appear to be the ability to think in four-dimensions, the ability to work in difficult and diverse situations within groups, the ability to work under severe time constraints, and the ability to deal with uncertainty. Even with the increased “quantification” of the earth sciences these qualitative skills remain critical for student success, and are often what sets our students apart from other scientists in other fields and keeps them highly desirable in the marketplace.

The NAGT-USGS Cooperative Summer Field Training Program is the longest, continuously running internship program in the earth sciences. Over the past forty years, over 1500 students have participated in this program with an significant number of these individuals becoming fulltime employees of the USGS and/or successful in other areas of the earth sciences. The fact that this program continues to utilize the student pool from traditional field camp courses, coupled with the fact that the internships today are highly interdisciplinary and systems-science based, yields the plausible conclusion that the skill sets developed in traditional field courses have significant applicability outside of what is considered “traditional geology.”