FIELD-BASED EDUCATION AS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF RECRUITMENT, RETENTION, AND PROFESSIONAL PREPARATION

Field courses and training have always been a key component of Geoscience education, yet the number of opportunities afforded to students continues to dwindle year after year. Traditionally presented as capstone opportunities for students to apply what they have learned throughout the course of their education, the limiting of field courses to only upper-division and more senior students severely limits the impact that field courses and field training can have on recruitment, retention, and ultimately the professional development and chosen career path of students interested in Geoscience- and Environmental Science-related disciplines (referred to as GEO-STEM). Traditional geoscience curricula dictate that students are exposed to only a small fraction of Earth and Environmental Sciences through the first two, or even three years, of their education. The breadth of GEO-STEM and the potential career paths and application of their education and training often does not begin to become apparent until they are very late in their undergraduate program in these settings. Levelled, non-field-camp, field courses that are integrated into the curriculum can provide an ideal opportunity to improve recruitment, retention, and professional preparation throughout GEO-STEM disciplines.

Recruitment of GEO-STEM majors into the discipline is increasingly important in the budget model of most universities, and retention and matriculation of these students is critical to the future of the GEO-STEM workforce which is facing a nationwide shortage of trained personnel by the end of the decade. Through a series of NSF-funded Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grants, we have developed a series of field courses designed for second-, third-, and fourth-year students that are separate from ‘field camp’, and focus more on the application and environmental significance of their education to real-world questions. The results over the last eight years, combined with the inability to run them during COVID, demonstrate that these courses have had a significant impact on recruit and retention into GEO-STEM as well as on the rate of students entering the workforce or continuing on to graduate programs.