THE PREPARATION AND IMMEDIATE FUTURE PLANS OF GEOSCIENCE GRADUATES WITH MASTER’S AND DOCTORAL DEGREES

The American Geosciences Institute’s Geoscience Student Exit Survey asks recent geoscience graduates about their educational background, co-curricular experiences while completing their degree, and their immediate plans after graduation, as well as their attitudes toward some of their experiences. AGI has been collecting this data since 2013 for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral graduates. We will present the pathways of geoscience graduates from master’s and doctoral degree programs in the United States from 2013-2016 to reveal the general trends and choices conducted by graduate students in preparation for entering the geoscience workforce, including their experience in the field, with research, and through internships, as well as their attitudes towards these activities in preparing them to enter the workforce. Comparisons from this data will also be drawn from the career pathway choices of past master’s and doctoral graduates as presented in the National Science Foundation’s restricted-use data of the Survey of College Graduates and Survey of Earned Doctorates.

Along with a discussion of the choices and pathways conducted by recent graduate students in the geosciences, the presentation presents some of the challenges in conducting the Exit Survey, particularly in gathering data about recent graduates from graduate programs, and how this survey will move forward in the future.