UNDERGRADUATE CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND PREPARATION TO REPLENISH THE GEOSCIENCE WORKFORCE

Attracting, recruiting, retaining, and graduating students (from both the undergraduate and the graduate levels) and creating pathways for them into the geoscience workforce remain a daunting challenge for the geoscience community, and this dilemma is acutely the reality for minority students. Although some successes have been reported with this overall plight, the demand for the entrance of new talent into the geosciences still far outweighs the supply. Even with the employment of best practice ideas and methodologies, there is yet abundant need for innovation and creative thinking if this crisis is to be sufficiently ameliorated. Via funding from an NSF IUSE: GEOPATHS grant, the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York has created and successfully implemented a geoscience program that attracts, recruits, and equips non-geoscience, STEM undergraduate majors for employment in the geoscience workforce. Along with its geoscience industry partners which include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the New York City Department of Transportation, and Partner Energy (a private environmental science company), this program has successfully exposed these students to - and placed them in - the geoscience workforce. This presentation highlights the winter training, research internship, and summer workforce internship components of this promising initiative.