SUPPORTING FEMALE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS THROUGH COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH INVOLVING GEOSCIENTISTS FROM THE FULL SPECTRUM OF CAREER STAGES

Women remain underrepresented in the field of geology, particularly within academia. While students benefit from senior female mentors, sometime the prospect of making the bridge from being an undergraduate student to a professor can seem daunting and unattainable. Students may dismiss the idea of pursuing academia early on in their careers, as they cannot see themselves reflected in the faculty around them for any number of reasons. I use international field research in a diverse, multi-institutional setting to informally educate undergraduates about graduate school experiences and career options beyond. In the summer of 2016, I brought two female students to Kenya for three weeks of fieldwork on collaborative projects. They joined a seven-person research team comprised of five women (including my 2 undergraduate students), one male full professor, and one local Kenya male field assistant. The team’s experience ranged from a senior faculty member to the undergraduates but importantly included female geoscientists from the full spectrum of points of their careers (graduate student, postdoc, and assistant professor). In this context, the female undergraduates were exposed to, and formed personal connections with, a diverse array of geoscientists. In addition to learning and applying fundamental sedimentological, stratigraphical, and palaeontological skills, a major goal of this project was to increase the undergraduates’ confidence in interacting with and contributing to science in a research-intensive setting. Ultimately, the undergraduate student summer researchers came away from the experience with more information about graduate school that hopefully will better prepare them for the process. They also saw first hand how a junior geoscientist developes with support from a variety of mentors, including peers, experts with non-traditional knowledge, and faculty. Exposing undergraduates to graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty is particularly essentially in undergrad-intensive liberal arts schools, where students are not regularly interacting with graduate teaching assistants. Through interacting with female geoscientists at all stages of their career, female undergraduate students may be able to more directly see themselves reflected in an academic trajectory.