EARLY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OUTREACH, CAREER TRAINING, AND NEAR-PEER MENTORING AT THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE LEVEL

Recruiting, supporting, and transferring diverse students from community college geoscience programs is a underutilized tool for increasing diversity and participation in four-year geoscience programs. This project is a collaboration between Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) and the University of Utah with the goal of increasing completion, diversity, and transfer rates of geology majors at SLCC. This project is implementing an undergraduate research program at the community college in combination with near-peer mentoring, university outreach, equipment training, career advising from professionals, and transfer support. SLCC geology student participants receive mentoring from community college and university faculty and an upper-division undergraduate peer from the University of Utah. In addition, students recruit non-majors from the general education geology class to assist with field work, thus bringing the benefits of research to a wider audience. Students visit partnering universities for outreach activities, get input from the faculty advisory board, participate in the transfer support program, attend technical talks at the local professional association, and attend talks with career professionals. In the first year of the three-year project, 11 students participated with a dropout rate of 36%. First year demographics are 64% female and 36% from underrepresented minority groups. The project is evaluated mostly with surveys (Pre-Survey n=11, Mid-Survey n=5, and Post-Survey n=2). Due to low sample sizes, comparisons of pre- and post-surveys isn’t possible yet. However, a formative assessment survey issued in the middle of the project show that most participants like the work and are getting enough mentoring. Participants recommend the project be better organized with clearer expectations and less stressful work. So far, lessons learned by the co-PIs include: students need more mentoring than planned, general education non-majors are hesitant to participate, students get stressed easily, students are intimidated by faculty so a near-peer upper-division undergraduate is important, and diversity training and the faculty advisory board meeting made faculty seem more approachable and connected students to partnering universities.