SUCCESSFUL RECRUITMENT STRATEGIES FOR A SUMMER INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

The Research Experience in Solid Earth Science for Students (RESESS) program, administered at UNAVCO with funding from the NSF Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences program, offers summer internships to undergraduate students from underrepresented groups. For the summer of 2011 we sought to substantially increase the number of applicants, the number and geographic range of applicants' home academic institutions, and the quality (as measured by overall GPA) of our applicant pool. We posted on websites of scientific organizations and minority associations and sent announcements to faculty, listservs, and people who had access to faculty. We used the Institute for Broadening Participation as an important partner in reaching students and faculty. We asked the NSF program for HBCUs to send our recruitment flyer to their contacts and we paid for the opportunity to use the AGI membership list for a similar announcement. As various internship websites and media organizations picked up these postings, RESESS announcements penetrated the general internship market on the web. Former interns also contributed to recruiting success, providing 10% of our new applications. In 2011 we received more than 100 initial applications from students at 60 different US academic institutions. Of those 100, 78 submitted complete application packages and 68 exceeded our minimum GPA threshold of 2.5. Based on essay question responses, we believe that a majority of those 68 would self-identify with one of the OEDG minority groups. Faced with an abundance of high-quality applicants for our small (11 new interns in 2011) program, we shared our finalist list with several NSF REU programs which led to three applicants being accepted into other internship programs. During the summer we provide our interns with a challenging research experience working with science mentors on a discrete project, and a writing mentor on producing a research paper, a presentation, and a poster. This summer's interns kept blogs that we hope will help to draw future applicants to our program. Several of the 2011 interns are presenting their scientific results at national meetings, including this meeting of the GSA.