 you a little about CSG and then about the goals of this meeting. CSG is a committee of volunteer experts in a variety of geophysical disciplines. We serve as the focal point for community discussion on issues related to the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the Earth. We also provide a forum to bring federal agencies and stakeholders together on these topics. CSG is proudly sponsored by four federal agencies, NSF, National Science Foundation, NASA, US Geological Survey, and the Department of Energy. Today's meeting on enhancing quantitative capacity of geosciences programs grew out of discussions at past meetings related to high performance computing, machine learning, and the educational approaches that universities are taking to provide quantitative training to geosciences students. In this meeting we'll discuss the core analytical skills needed to prepare undergraduate geosciences majors for graduate working careers and best practices for integrating analytical skills into undergraduate curricula. We've been lucky enough to bring together a number of very engaged and fantastic participants for our two sessions. Each session begins with two talks, followed by a panel. The moderators will quickly introduce the speakers and panels at the beginning of each of the sessions. So for those of you who are attending a meeting where they're both presenters and panelists, we ask that you follow a few logistics. So your video and audio have been turned off and muted, so if you have questions for the speakers or panelists, please use the Q&A box to ask your question. You can access that by hovering your mouse at the bottom of the screen and clicking Q&A. If the question is for a particular speaker or panelist, please note that in your chat. That will help the panelists then address the specific question. Then we'll get through as many questions as we can, but we may not be able to answer all of your questions today. If you have any technical issues, you can contact the National Academy's staff through the Q&A box and they will do their best to help you. The presentations and video recording, yes, there's a video recording of this meeting today. They'll be posted within two weeks on our website and that's the COSG website of the National Academy's of Sciences. So session one is going to be moderated by Mark Bain from and I'll let him go ahead and take over now. Great. Thanks, Cindy. I'm Mark Bain. I'm an associate professor at Boston College and I'm going to be monitoring the first session of today's workshop and this is going to focus on what core analytical skills are needed to prepare undergraduate geoscience majors for careers and graduate degrees in the modern world. We'll have two presentations, as Cindy mentioned. They'll be given by Sharon Moser and Barbara Tewkesbury and they'll each have 15 minutes for their presentation and then I'll take a few quick questions focused on that presentation and then they will be joined by Prenadi Asher and Chris Keane for our panel discussion afterwards. So I'll start. Sharon Moser will give the first presentation. She is the Dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and her expertise is in structural geology, structural petrology and tectonics. She served as both the president of the American Geoscience Institute as well as the president of the Geological Society of America and we're very happy to have her speaking today on preparing undergraduate geoscience majors for successful careers in a quantitative world. Sharon, I'll turn it over to you. I think you're muted. I am no longer muted. Thank you. Today I want to talk about how you prepare undergraduate geoscience majors for successful careers in a very quantitative world. Am I unmuted now? Okay. I want to talk about preparing undergraduate geoscience majors for successful careers in quantitative in a quantitative world and I will be addressing the questions that were posed for this particular session throughout. And I am there. Okay. For the last six years, I've been spearheading a national initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to look at the future of undergraduate geoscience education. A number of objectives, but one of the primary ones was to identify a consensus on what skills, concepts and competencies were needed for undergraduate students going both to graduate school or going straight to the workforce. The first step was really in trying to develop a high level community vision for the geosciences. We've had well over a thousand active participants in this and it ranged from meetings and surveys and such of everything from employers to educators in two year colleges to R1 research universities. And in particular, we had a geoscience employers workshop in 2015 with participants that represented all the employers that hired geologists and geophysicists. Since 2016, we've been working on how you implement and actually working with heads and chairs across the country to actually implement this community vision. For more information, you can look at this website and we're in the process of writing a vision and change document which will go to all departments. Since it's relevant for this particular talk in 2018, we did initiate a graduate geoscience education initiative for earth oceans and atmospheric sciences. We've had a 2008 geoscience employers workshop so three years after the other one as well as working with heads and chairs. I haven't got that. One of the major conclusions early on in the summit was that developing skills competencies and conceptual understandings was more important than taking specific courses. And I mentioned this only because if you're going to try to change your curriculum it's important to know if you don't know already that if you try to get faculty to decide what courses people should take it's very difficult. If you ask them what they should know and do, you usually get uniform agreement. We did work a lot on concepts which I won't talk about today. Basically we were focusing on developing an understanding of our concepts, processes, impacts, results, and building a working framework for their future education. I don't know what I don't think I'm controlling the slides. We spent a lot of time on skills as well both science skills and geoscience specific skills and these are the skills that were brought forward by the academics in particular. What you're seeing on the right is a graph that shows the 500 people who took this survey, what their opinions were, blue is very important, red is important, and you can see the relative rankings of these. For the purpose of this talk I think these are the particular skills that were most important. The employers at their workshop agreed that all these were important and that the students needed to be proficient and in some cases masters of these particular ones. I'm not, I need to advance, thank you. The employers also were very interested in how students thought and what they actually would be able to do in addition to knowing these skills. Things that we tend to call earth science habits of mine or geoscientific thinking, being able to think temporally and spatially, so 3D and 4D, and also working at geologic as well as real-time scales, be able to do systems thinking where you look at all the different parts of the system and how they interact and feedbacks with earth, obviously being the most obvious one for students to be involved with and doing geologic reasoning and synthesis. Obviously they were interested in problem solving, with students understanding it was an open dynamic system, and using real data and non-unique answers, working by analogy, inference, and so on. They thought students should be intellectually flexible, they would learn and be able to apply skills not only to what they knew today, but what they would be faced with in different situations of future, be able to do critical thinking, evaluate the literature, and have some experience with authentic research and collection of new information. They particularly thought it was important for students to be prepared for lifelong learning. They needed to have the ability to learn and apply new concept and ideas and learn how to learn and use new technology and software. Sharon, you're good. I'm not sure how I keep getting muted. There are also a lot of non-quantitative skills, and one in particular that's relevant to this would be field experiences in field camps and GIS, because the employers felt it improved spatial cognition, created problem solving, teamwork, geoscience, synthesis, as well as geospatial reasoning, teamwork, working on interdisciplinary projects, project management, everything from goal setting to time management was thought to be important, communication skills both verbal and scientific, and written to a wide variety of audiences as well as being able to listen, and non-technical skills that range from ethics to, you know, understanding societal relevance and implications of what they were doing, and these kinds of things they thought should be integrated throughout the curriculum. Next, in terms of quantitative skills, the employers felt that all undergraduate students needed probability and statistics, that they would need it for uncertainty analysis, risk assessment and communicating uncertainty, and that they all should have calculus. When you got to the higher level math, they did highly recommend it overall, which depended on the type of employment, so employers who were mainly dealing with fluid flow thought students had to have differential equations, those who were dealing with complex multilinear systems analysis that they needed linear algebra. When we had the employer's workshop in 2018 for graduate students, it was very clear that they expected students that were going on to graduate school would have had these things or should get them as soon as they could. And one thing that's important to recognize, it's the cognitive development that takes place in these, is extremely beneficial to students mastering geologic thinking. And another thing which I know Chris Keane will say is that a high level quantitative skills is something that increases the employability of students as well as their resiliency when they're a downturn. Next, computational skills were also important, computational methods, basic programming skills, scripted languages, being able to code. They didn't talk about analyzing algorithms, but they certainly did the graduate workshop for employers, and with the increase in machine learning in AI, I really think this is something that's going to move into the undergraduate realm as well. They talked about modeling statistical analyses, using visual models and modeling tools and simulations, and integrating large data settings. In general, the employers thought for these particular ones students should be proficient, having applied or used these in their coursework on projects, and they also thought it was really important for students to have experience thinking about how to solve a problem computationally. And they wanted technological diversity. They were concerned that students would use things as black boxes and they really need to understand them and integrate all of their different skills together. Next, data management and data analysis was also something that was discussed, that it's needed currently for employment, but it's going to be increasingly important in the future across the entire employer spectrum, the ability to handle and analyze big data. Students need to be aware of data analytics, the applications, and the processes for using data. They need to be able to examine large data sets, do statistical analyses to draw conclusions about what's contained, and integrating, merging information, different kinds of information, and data, and synthesizing it to solve problems. All of this was thought at the undergraduate level. If you look at the graduate level, which I've posted here, they went into much more depth and I think what we're going to see is over time this is going to migrate more and more into the underground realm. Next, geospatial skills and geospatial reasoning was also considered quite important. The statistical skills related to working with large geospatially controlled data, both the data, the objects, the events, using the tools and displaying them, and geospatial reasoning, basically using logic to infer implicit spatial relationships from geospatial data, connecting your problem representation with the data, developing multiple mental models, and making predictions, and testing, and so on. And again, geospatial skills is something that's highly marketable, and is a good hook for getting students to do them. Next, so how do we reach students at all institutions? Experial and mental learning is the way. We need to integrate math and computational methods throughout our geoscience courses at all levels and use them to solve geoscience problems. Students in classes need constant engagement opportunities and practice these skills. They need to do problem solving. They need to analyze real data, including large data sets, integrate technology into classrooms, visualization simulations, and so on. One idea is to use games to teach and reward innovation, and also introduce data analytics and data management, and actually the words. Many of us have taught these kinds of things for many years, but the students and the employers do not seem to recognize that this is data analytics and data management that we've been doing. You can use tiered approaches. For example, there's math you need when you need it, a series of online resources for introductory geoscience courses, even non-major courses that use common mathematical applications as is appropriate, spreadsheets across the curriculum, again online resources for not just introductory but also upper level geoscience courses that uses the computational functions in Microsoft Excel to solve science related and geoscience related problems, and then tearing upwards specialized courses on mathematical applications in the geosciences. And again, there's a range of resources to support. Next, you need to be creative. Case studies are great if you do them within courses or entire courses, where students have to collect and analyze data, synthesize it, make decisions, and communicate that, identifying both the problems and the sufficient solutions can all be done within a class or classes can be built around them, having team projects that are interdisciplinary and collaborative. Some groups have been having them shared across multiple courses, so you have a project that you can build different skills in moving forward. You can replace the second semester calculus and or differential equations in linear algebra with geomath courses, and of course you can have scanline courses as well. And another thing that is becoming invoked is certificate programs. You may find other departments in your college or university have certificates, their external certificates, and the you can also develop them themselves. And it's really good if you can build open and easily usable databases for students in all fields and share it. Next, and of course the gold standard is your research capstone courses or experiences. It's really the best place to really provide a substantial experience for students and the students where they can use authentic do authentic research and collect new information. And those range from capstone courses that are very similar to engineering design courses, independent research experience in projects, senior theses, internships, RAUs, and of course fieldwork and field experiences. And you can embed quantitative computational and or geospatial skills into all of these. And it's something that we need to do starting early and going all throughout a curriculum. Next, just a couple really quick examples from some of the work we've been doing. A number of BA and BS only institutions have taken their elective courses and are focusing on the things industry wanted, including quantitative and technical skills. One small institution, the geology business and math departments developed a new BS interdisciplinary BS degree in geobusiness and data analytics, where they take core geology classes and then courses in business statistics, big data management, spatial analysis, and programming. And then another one created a BS degree built on geospatial interest that includes core geology classes and then earning a certificate in GIS and then a certificate in a technical field, including computer programming and other types of quantitative methods. Next. And PhD, R1 institutions still have the same problem with undergraduates, not necessarily having the computer and math skills that they need. And in general they've been working to increase examples in every course or into all elective courses throughout their curriculum. And one in particular has paired courses throughout the undergraduate trajectory to show how these translate and has team projects that span more than one course. And another one instituted their own course and also was using the hook to get the students to take these by emphasizing that they need these skills for the job market today. And I just thought it was kind of interesting that one proposed a data analytics course and the university curriculum committee said no, geoscience doesn't need it, so they required a biology one instead. Next. So to end, one of the things that we need to recognize is that if we're preparing students for the real-world professional projects when they go out in the workforce or future research in academia, the most important thing is critical thinking and problem solving. Working with real data and there's a lot of things there that are done by all kinds of people in terms of solving problems, but there's a list of things there that are things that are very specific to the geosciences and they're things that we really need to address with our undergraduate majors. And then lastly, next slide. I just put up here the skills that the 2018 graduate employers of PhDs and Masters for Earth, Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences came up with and if you compare those to the things that I've been talking about they're exactly the same, but it's a greater depth. So what we're seeing is employers are thinking that you and some of these are research institutions, universities, NASA, and other places like that. They're seeing a progression from undergraduates becoming proficient at these things and then becoming masters and then by the time they finish their PhD becoming experts. So it's a continuum and we need to start preparing our students for that continuum. With that, thank you. Great. Thank you very much for that excellent talk. For those in the audience, if you have questions just please post them to that question and answer box and I will read them out. I have one from Chris Russinello. Dr. Moser, you showed data that folks care more about skills than courses, but how do they demonstrate skills easily when courses have been the coin of the realm? Yes, it's not just skills, it's skills and, sorry, don't ask me, sorry, it's skills and concepts and competencies and there's a lot of different ways that you can address assessing whether students have these skills and I can't go into great detail right now, but it's really the competency, the ability for them to use these skills and the ability for them to use these concepts and they have to be assessed and they have to be integrated in courses. I have another question from Matri Perin which commented that a lot of these were findings that you had had come out of the 2014 study and I guess the question was in what ways have these been acted upon? In other words, how, in what ways have these been implemented in various curriculum? Oh, I was reading the other question, sorry. In terms of, we've got 91 different universities across the spectrum that have put together action plans. 53 have given us progress reports after a year and a half to three years. Individual department heads wrote an action plan for their department to try to implement these types of things and that also included pedagogy and diversity and a lot of other things as well and what they've done is they've tried to do this and I've got, you know, 50-some reports of what strategies work, what strategies didn't work, what problems were, how to overcome them and then advice and all that stuff that is going to be in the vision and change document and we have it all written up that part in terms of the case studies and we're going to, I believe if Chris nods his head, we're going to be posting that on the website but it's very, very interesting. I mean one of the things that really helps a lot is to do retreats and to do backwards design of your curriculum. I mean there's a lot of things that, you know, there's a lot of resources on the CERC sites that tell you how to do these things. Yeah, great. Yeah, we have one more question. I'm actually going to save the other open question that we have until we get to our panel discussion because I think it would be great for the panel and it's a very timely question about the current situation with COVID-19 and field programs and we'll switch and we'll have Barbara Tewkesbury give her presentation and then we'll come back for the panel. So next I'd like to introduce Barbara. She is the Upson Chair of Public Discourse and a professor of Geoscience at Hamilton College. Her expertise is in structural geology and she's been a leader in national geoscience education for more than 20 years and has given workshops to faculty across the country and internationally and her presentation will be entitled Small Departments with Broad Missions Challenges and Strategies for Meeting the Needs of Geomajors and Diverse Career Goals. So I'm going to try sharing my screen. Let's just see how this works. Let me know if this doesn't work. I will convey it over to you folks. Looks good so far. So far so good. Yep. Excellent. Also I'm out in rural upstate New York and if my bandwidth starts to go I will shut my video off as well but just let me know. Just break in and interrupt me and I'll I'll turn my video off as well. Okay so Sharon's given us a really excellent overview of the preparation that future geoscience professionals need what students need to have for graduate school and my role here today is to present a small department perspective. We also prepare future geoscientists and we want to prepare them well but we have constraints that relate to the size of the department, the number of majors, and our mission and I want to outline those for you so that they can be taken into consideration as as the discussions go forward about what undergraduate departments should be doing. So I'm going to start by looking at the landscape of how supporting science and math is incorporated into geo departments at small colleges and I'm doing this primarily as a proxy. So if we want our students to be more quantitatively literate in the broad sense then this is a way of looking at what sort of constraints we have for making that a requirement of all of our students. So what I did was I chose 25 small liberal arts colleges and they're all small liberal arts colleges with only undergraduate degrees in geology with the exception of one of them and they're small-ish so their total enrollments are on the order of 2000 graduating on average about 500 a year and in 2017 this group of 25 undergraduate liberal arts colleges have graduated on on the order of about a dozen majors a year although that ranges from a minimum of two to a maximum of 23 and of those 25 colleges the the way I chose them was I picked the the top ones in the U.S. News and World Report I think we skipped a slide here so sorry somehow or another way I managed to skip a slide but the way I chose these schools was to look at the U.S. News and World Report top 20 undergraduate liberal arts colleges in the country and those schools of those 20 there were 14 of them with geomajors so I chose those 14 plus I added another 11 so that there were a total of 25 schools that we could go take a look at and see what what these departments do and the first list below with the asterisk is the ones that come from the top 20 in the U.S. News and World Report and the the second list is the additional ones that I added to to take a look at at those 25 and you'll see that obviously these are all small liberal arts colleges and I don't mean by any stretch of the imagination to say that what I'm going to say applies to all small geo departments around the country there's a huge diversity but I think there's a value in looking at a group where we can kind of compare apples to apples so that we have a better sense of what at least a small group of quality liberal arts colleges are doing with their geomajors. The other reason is that there are a number of reasons to think that this is a good group to look at they have strong undergraduate teaching programs there are high expectations for faculty research particularly faculty research that involves undergraduate students and these are schools that are known for preparing students well for graduate school. Hamilton is in this group it's kind of in the middle of the pack in terms of the number of majors we graduated in 2017 we graduated 14 majors at about 450 undergraduates total in that graduating class and we enroll about 2 000 students so we're kind of in the middle and I've had the opportunity to do external reviews at many of these institutions or go and give talks of departmental consultations so I know a fair amount about these aside from what they show on their websites so I'm going to focus on the role that coursework in supporting science and math these are the cognate science and math courses that that we talk about in addition to the kinds of courses that geostudents pay in geology and the role that those courses play in these 25 schools and in order to do this I've divided the group of 25 into two groups a group that offers only one degree in geology and a second group that offers both a ba and a bs and I'm going to start with the 21 out of 25 that offer only one degree in geology I'll say that for some schools this is a choice offering only one degree in geology but many of these schools simply do not have a choice because the college itself is accredited only for ba so it doesn't matter whether you're getting a undergraduate degree in chemistry physics math geology or philosophy it's still going to be a ba Hamilton is among that group so we're in this group of 21 and I looked at two things the first thing I looked at was whether supporting science and math courses are required for every student graduating with a major in geology and for this group of 21 the requirement ranges from none to four courses and by four courses I mean four semester courses and the range from none to one to two to three to four is pretty evenly split among those 21 schools and almost all of these schools offer a choice so a student could choose two courses a math and the physics or a stats and a chemistry so that there's not a universal set of courses that all geomajors who graduate from that department would have had the second thing is I looked at what role supporting and science math prerequisites play for geocourses in other words what does a student have to have a particular supporting science and math course in order to take a geocourse if we look at the core courses for a major most of these do not have any science prerequisites whatsoever so one would not have to have had a course in chemistry to take mineralogy or a math course to take structure and the same is true for virtually all upper level courses most don't have prerequisites although there are a few that do 300 level course in geochemistry for instance is likely to have a chemistry course as a as a prerequisite if we look at the remaining four that offer both a ba and a bs if we look at the bs degree universally some level of supporting science is required in math physics and chemistry either one or two semesters and it's very clear from what the department says on its website that they are advising all students who plan to be geoscientists and geoscience professionals to go this route to to take the bs instead of the ba if we look at the supporting science and math courses that are prerequisite for geocourses however the situation is almost identical to the 21 that only offer a ba or only offer one degree very few core courses have supporting science requirements very few elective courses do as well the rationale of course is that if you require chemistry for mineralogy then there would be de facto requirements for the ba so in a sense the the landscape in the geo department itself is not any different what is different is what students are required to do in order to graduate with a degree in in geology so in these top 25 ranked departments the only courses that have supporting science prerequisites are really upper level courses and the kinds of courses that graduate student schools typically expect from students coming in out of undergraduate school are not required across the board for virtually every one of these departments except the few that offer a bs as well as a ba on the other hand there's not a single one of these departments that doesn't have a website that advises any one of our students who are going to on an academia or industry graduate school and so on to not take a full suite of supporting sciences they all say you know this is if this is where you're headed then you should be taking this full suite of expected supporting sciences and math so i think it's important to think about why these schools who do a pretty good job of of preparing students for graduate school and so on aren't requiring those supporting science and and math courses we all know that the level of preparation that students get in high school is not anywhere comparable in earth science and geoscience to what students get in biology chemistry or or even in physics and many students have not had an earth science course when they come to college and that means that very few students actually come to college or university attending a major in geology it's a very small number i've talked with many faculty at other departments about this and it's it's typical of what we see at hamilton out of 500 incoming students we might see one or two maybe three students who say i'm here at a major in geology this is what i'm really interested in and if you had 5 000 incoming students instead of 500 and you had 10 to 30 students who are coming in with an interest in majoring in geology you could probably manage a viable department with that because even if you didn't capture everybody if you came in if 30 came in and you got 25 you could probably manage with that at at an institution that that has more students on the other hand at a school like hamilton or any one of these other small schools graduating a handful of majors a year isn't sustainable and over the long haul runs the risk of a department being closed down so bottom line is we can't rely solely on walk-ins and and we have to recruit we have to recruit actively for for geomajors so what does this then have to do with supporting science most small departments have learned that they can't increase numbers enough by recruiting only future geoscientists especially when we have these competing environmental science programs so even if we take the people who are interested in geology as they come in and then try to pull in people who have started out in physics or chemistry or economics or whatever and and get them in with the intention of majoring in geo to go on to careers it just doesn't build our departments up and up enough to have the kind of departments we want with the communities and the number of students so most small departments recruit more broadly using a couple of other strategies these are all liberal arts colleges and so broadening the umbrella is one simple strategy that many departments use nobody at Hamilton would expect a philosophy major to become a professional philosopher for instance so we we encourage and all these liberal arts colleges welcome and encourage students who are interested in the earth but they want to go do something else uh professionally and we treat them the same way they're i they're identical to geomajors who are going to be professional geologists and it's all one big community of working in the same direction um we also can really benefit by truly recruiting on an expanded departmental mission so in other words not just taking people in who are interested in geology and saying this is a great undergraduate major for you but actively recruiting really outstanding students whose future plans could benefit by a strong geoscience grounding so students who are going on like one of my my advisees who's a double major in world politics and geo and she wants to have a career in in world politics and she's well aware that knowing more about geoscience at a deep level not just at the intro level is going to make a difference to how she can contribute and i'll i'll also say that we have students every year who go on in medicine or go into the military or go on in public policy or something like that and it's and it's a way that we can increase our number of majors have a viable program of a vibrant program and not be sending everybody on to a graduate program in in geology and in both of these instances these students who are not going to be geoscience professionals um don't necessarily need those supporting sciences and and math or the kind of preparation that Sharon described at an unequal measure and they need they do need on the other hand the freedom to tailor what they do at the undergraduate level to their own career goals um so how what do we do how do how do we actually support science and math preparation in that kind of flexible curriculum so for the in the first instance um academic advising plays a very very prominent role at small liberal arts colleges and so right from the from the get go we are very consistent early and often in our advice that students who think they might want to go on to careers in in geoscience should do that kind of preparation and it's for those students that kind of a universal uh background in a particular aspect of quantitative skills would be useful um for all students Sharon mentioned this the math you need when you need it this is a way where we can bring in content and skills in a geo context rather than having students take a full course so whether it's chemistry physics programming gis math will bring in the chemistry they need when they're taking mineralogy my colleague in hydrogeology teaches a little bit of calculus when he teaches hydrogeology and so on and um departments also take the opportunity if faculty expertise is appropriate and there are enough interested students to offer elective courses in applications of something geochemistry or chemistry physics matlab uh programming to the geosciences and that's another way that we try to um incorporate that for all students the other thing that that we do is um involves students in undergraduate research small small liberal arts colleges on this particular list have lower teaching loads than small departments at public institutions typically have um and we also have higher research expectations but we have no graduate students so we can accommodate virtually any student who's interested in research even at the first or second level and um we also require a senior thesis of all our geomajors and many of the schools on that list of 25 do the same thing so there are ways of addressing these supporting science and math ideas in this flexible curriculum without absolutely requiring that everybody goes to um a particular level in in linear algebra and i have to say that this is this is a particularly the advising in the research projects are very successful for departments like this i can't think of a time in the last 15 years when i have not sent a student to graduate school who hasn't had extra math preparation up through linear algebra differential equations it's had chemistry physics and so on and that is simply by advising so the advising system is good for us so what could we do that we aren't doing um most of these institutions don't have much of a track record in partial credit partial semester mini courses and things like that we could certainly be doing that offering quantitative applications in geology on a partial credit basis after the semester all of us are going to know the ins and outs of zoom and we could certainly consider using zoom for multi-institutional courses where we might not have an expert in matlab but someone else does and we could have zoom sessions for uh for a course in matlab and students from a bunch of different institutions or find out from alumni using zoom what did they find that was essential that invaluable wish what did they wish they had done or taken while they're at hamilton because when we've got somebody successful out there in industry saying what they should be doing it's a lot more powerful than if we say this is what you should be doing so what can't we do and i'm just going to pardon me i just i just didn't uh i'm just a little concerned about time make sure we have enough for the panel so yep um i've got just one more slide after this okay great thank you so uh there's really no disagreement that that we have to prepare students but we simply can't design curricula that addresses only those future geoscientists we need to have viable departments and all of us really should be welcoming geomajors who don't intend to be geoscience professional and i i want to emphasize that a one size fits all curriculum is not going to be good for small geoscience departments and what we need then is a current perspective on what's needed for geoscience professionals which is the purpose of this meeting and then um some creative ideas for integrating stronger preparation in the context of what we can actually do at this range of our institution types that's it great thank you very much um we're what i think i'm gonna do is i've we've got some questions for you but what i'm gonna do is switch it over i'm gonna let uh introduce the other two panelists and then i'll come back and i'll direct some of those to you as well as actually letting people chime in across the panel if that sounds all right with you um so for the panel um i'd like also like to introduce um prunati asher and chris keen prunati is the education and public outreach manager for the american geophysical union um and she has built an extensive portfolio during her time at hgu focused on programs and issues related to higher education and chris is um the american geosciences institute agis director of communications and technology and also the editor of earth magazine and the way we'll do this is i'm gonna let each of them jump in with and just give a quick introduction of themselves with one or two slides and then we will open up um the panel two questions and i'll start going through some of these ones that i know you guys have been posting um throughout the the two previous talks so um prunati would you like to go first sure and i'd like to uh share my screen so i'm gonna do that i take it you can see my slides yes excellent all right thank you very much thank you for inviting me to be part of this panel and this wonderful discussion so um i'm gonna try to address some of the things that share and discuss and some of the things that barb brought up and hopefully um this will be useful to you as faculty and perhaps even more useful to your students who are currently thinking about continuing on with their studies in the geosciences so thanks for the introduction i'm in addition to being a staff member at the american geophysical union i also spend some of my time at agi so i'm going to talk about a project that i've been working on at agi for the last a year and a half or two years so as we know uh we you know are looking at our students for them to acquire skills and there are three ways in which they acquire these skills one is through their academic preparation you know the courses they take the experiences they have in the classroom and the lab and in the field other skills are acquired through their co-curricular activities that you know sort of complement what they're learning in the classroom or in the field and then last but not least also activities and programs that they might participate in through summer for example a research experience for undergraduates or working on research with their professors just like barb was alluding to a few minutes ago so how do we give these students guidance to go and acquire those skills that barb mentioned you know if you can't teach them in your department because of small numbers of faculty how do they get those those skills because these are the skills that perhaps employers are looking for or these are skills that graduate programs are hoping that these students will come with so that they are not you know they don't fall behind they can continuing on with their studies and finish up in a timely manner so to answer this question we have been sort of working on this project we're calling them career compasses and i'll walk you through how you might read one of these and i'll share the link later on so you can download these for yourself so if you focus your attention and i seem to have lost my mouse for some reason there we go on the right hand side here you will see a bunch of symbols and these are sort of the types of opportunities whether at the bottom here you see a you know a diploma and a motor board so it's the things you might get from academic preparation just moving up ahead in this right hand column things related to internships or opportunities to attend meetings and such so that symbology will kind of show up in this in this career compass on the top here on the left hand side you can see sort of the field of interest so i've chosen geophysics but i'll also share about some other compasses that i've created and below that you will see sort of a job summary for a typical geophysicist in the center of the this compass is of great interest to students and also perhaps faculty you can see this arrow that is sort of alluding to sort of a vertical scaffolding from a student that builds some basic skills you know while they're in school and through their curricular activities to growing and learning beyond the classroom in the lab to through extracurricular activities or other co-curricular activities to all the way to the top of this scaffolding if you will finding a way to connect with the community the professional community the practitioners of say geophysics in this diagram you'll also see three columns for undergraduate graduate masters or phd or postdoc and so this basically just alludes to where a student might be in their preparation it does not mean that anybody who wants to do geophysics must have a phd absolutely not so for example if you're as an undergrad interested in just sort of a tech technical position you know in a lab or something like that an undergraduate degree is all that you might need if you're looking to you know lead a national lab you know perhaps you need to have a phd in geophysics albeit a research institution or continue on and become a faculty member and again if you take a deep look at these you'll see that there are lots of courses that are listed that might be useful the types of research experiences that might be useful and so on and so forth so this particular compass is for geophysics and i want to give a shout out to iris and yunafco who helped helped with some of the content in these these compasses many of them exist and i'm going to just go to my next slide and just share with you the full list of compasses that are currently available there are things related to data science or you know if you are interested in being a gis in the field gis or hydrology or atmospheric science and so on and so forth there are others that are still in in preparation and last but not least if you're interested in accessing these you're welcome to go to the agis page click on the workforce link and you'll find a link to the compasses and i'm going to stop sharing my screen great thank you very much um chris would you like to introduce yourself and check have a minute or two um so i'm chris rakeen i head up gs science professional higher education program at agi i've been overseeing our workforce program for about the last 20 years hopefully many of you are familiar with our work um i really just particularly wanted to share one slide because my second one pretty much just amplifies a lot of what sharon mozier had discussed but the we hear it it always seems like there's a lot of complaints that the the employers don't like what they're getting um and the realities are they they are impressed with the students that come out but we do have data about the deficiencies in primary quantitative skills in the students so this is from our exit survey geoscience exit survey of graduates here in the united states uh from about a year and a half ago and i just want to point out so the blue is the undergraduate where we're really focused and you can see the percentage of the graduates who said that they have ever had a back course in the course of their higher education point to the linear algebra differential equations quantitative methods what's interesting about this and i think this this echoes exactly what barbett said those are students that take all of those they we're not seeing students that get past calc one and take one so what we have are is really a binary situation where we have students who are very quantitative and ones that are are lacking the other thing i want to point out where when i present on these our data particularly my colleagues in other fields in social sciences biology and they all fall off their chair is when you look and see that about 60 percent of our phd's have ever had a statistics course in their academic career that's pretty frightening and that's also very frightening in the standpoint of as we see things like ml take on which is really about you know map that you know data map and data reduction and it's fundamentally their statistical processes and if they don't understand even that that's a problem i think one of the other key points to bring up is is the resilience is very key so we have as we've surveyed our early career geoscientists those who tend to be the ones that are out here in this you know higher quantitative space do tend to be more resilient in their jobs they don't tend to lose them if they're practicing geoscientists they get lane shifted in the in the organizations into other other occupations until the geo pops back up particularly this is particularly the case in the resources and the environmental consulting field so really that that's just the add-on i wanted to provide to the the two excellent talks that were brought earlier great thank you very much so now i'm going to open it up to questions for the panel overall and i already have a few here and i actually want to start with one that came in during Sharon's talk which i think is very timely at the moment this is from James Knappen the question is the COVID-19 situation has compromised many summer field programs this year are there other alternatives we should be considering going forward including modular approaches during the academic year or virtual field geology studies to address long-standing issues with accessibility go ahead Sharon yes i would like to answer that i know that the field camp directors and people who run field programs have been having a lot of zoom meetings and have some subgroups where they've been working on different ways to do you know field camps you can't really do the same thing as you can when you get the students out in the field but there's a number of exercises that have been developed or are being developed for example almost like a game where you go through the landscape and you get to an outcrop and you see a field book and it describes it and tells you where you are and then you can you know over time build maps and things like that so there are things i think that in that will be developed during this particular time that will be useful particularly for students with disabilities or schools where they can't take their students out in the field but as somebody who used to be a field camp director i will say that field camp makes a huge difference in students being able to synthesize what they've learned and also think in terms of spatial relationships and temporal relationships but some departments already have modular courses where they have you know field courses during one semester where students go out on weekends some of them have you know three weeks or 10 days where they take students out during the year and those are very definitely things i think that will continue great thank you um here's a question that came in from Cindy actually during Barbara's talk so i'll put this to her do the small universities have increases in computing majors as well and are there opportunities in geospatial analysis that cross over between those and in particular is that a possible hook for smaller universities i think that's that's true i don't i know far less about the situation in that regard at other institutions than at hamilton currently geospatial analysis is is taught almost exclusively in the geo department so we do teach geospatial analysis in geo but we've just hired someone in environmental science who does a lot of that um there's no one in computing that directly teaches geospatial analysis but we have had students who have done projects senior thesis projects that merge computer science because they they go to computer science minor or computer science major and a geo major as well i'm not sure that that answers the question very effectively but um so one thing that um as a committee we had discussed actually um as a kind of a question for for all of you all is in order to do some of these things to improve the curriculum it often and we already have existing curriculums it typically means that in order to add things you've got to take something away and so i guess one question kind of a paired question and this is i'll pose this to the entire panel is how have you both in your experiences trying to add things to the curriculum how have you found the resistance to that and what ways have you tried to essentially figure out how you can fit in teaching these quantitative methods without losing things that faculty already view is critical to the curriculum that exists at the moment can i start is sure absolutely sure um i think barb gave some good examples and i gave some examples where what you're doing is you're integrating these things in the curriculum starting at the beginning and there are you know logical things that you really need to be able to do from a quantitative standpoint to answer geoscience questions and a number of departments you know are doing this now in terms of taking and removing things the people who've had the most success have used the backwards designer the mode matrix where you list your and barb could speak much better to this but basically where you list your courses and then you list the skills and competencies or concepts you want students to have and you have the faculty indicate you know do they do these things under what level and then you take your curriculum and you try to design it so that they get what they need in terms of skills as well as learning the things that people agree they know need to know go ahead barb oh go ahead yeah i i totally agree with what what Sharon has said and i'm going to take it down to the course level as well so it's more it once you have the the broader curricular departmental goals then trying to put that into practice in courses and the thing the single thing that helps the most in in helping people make progress towards actually doing that is to get over the tyranny of content that you have to work your way through chapter one two three four five six seven eight nine ten in order to have a good preparation in structural geology for example and i think on the cutting edge has done a lot of good work to help people rethink how to how to design courses for outcomes rather than content knowledge and i'm happy to talk with anybody about that at any point you can email me i'm i'm happy to chat on the phone i don't want to dominate this discussion with that but i think that's to me that's the way to go you just get over that tyranny of content and do what needs to be done and if i'm just chiming real quick i mean another good example is actually the physics community believe or not they have a problem with their students and their quantitative skills and their math phobias and i think this gets to some of the things that were pointed out about whether or not the sort of a quantitative methods and geocourse get rid of all the other requirements we have these great goals for them to take all these classes it's not necessarily what's needed because it is as Sharon pointed out and she and i have talked a lot it's about the conceptual understandings there are tools to do the the computation and so the other question is if you are looking at building up a more rigorous program quote-unquote on the quantitative side is not necessarily slot all those math department courses in there the look at you may even just have a seminar or some other approaches if you don't if the faculty maybe feel that there needs to be more prep before introducing it into the the inline curriculum so physics has actually been looking at that as well in some of their departments where they're struggling with their students not wanting to take the math as well um i have another question here actually specifically to um chris and pernati which is where do we stand with the industry in terms of trends in other words are we keeping pace in terms of undergrad skills and knowledge for data analytics machine learning and where industry would like to see undergraduates when they come out and are moving into jobs generally the industry at the undergraduate level feels that we're far behind uh in the level prep uh at that very technical component but a lot of it is very specific you know when they're looking for very specific skills versus the overall prep um i think the the the good news we heard at the undergraduate we definitely heard at the graduate level is industry feels that these are really good scientists coming out and if they're equipped to learn and move forward so i think in some ways it is a two-way street uh you know you can't have uh you know five years of experience in the two-year-old industry kind of situation um uh you know but i i think it's it's also the application uh if the students have had a chance to apply some of these math processes i think that goes a long ways uh as well particularly for the environmental firms where it's it's 100 applied and if they can understand drawdown curve things like that that that goes a long ways for them feeling that they're equipped i'm going to jump in here mark if you don't mind so i want to just piggyback on exactly what akriss said i was just going to go to the same point about environmental and sort of hydrology you know those types of those types of fields in preparing those or constructing those career compasses i i talked to the employers you know who are looking for those students as well as you know professors or departments that you know specialize in um you know hydrology or whatever have you so it was uh so in speaking with uh employers just as Sharon found out in her in her work that they they would say that you know we can train students to do this particular kind of test but if they don't have they don't have good field skills or they don't have basic math skills or they don't have basic you know this this we don't we don't want to want those kinds of students and think for that reason they think you know they come pretty unprepared and so they are uh so they kind of echoed that that same sentiment in helping give me content for these career compasses and it wasn't just hydro it was uh for data science you know it was sort of across the board you know atmospheric science and others who helped get me sort of the granularity of those compasses um i have a question from uh john arno for Sharon and Barbara wondering whether there's data showing that we're placing calculus in a math department um with geomath for who's geoscience students uh i know of uh a number of departments that are starting to do that i know of a couple i know penn state has been doing that for many many years and actually the students say it's harder than regular calculus um i think it's uh to some extent it's there's two things one it's a way of decreasing the number of courses um if you do for example geophysics is the second semester of physics or instead of the second semester calculus but the other thing it does is it applies the the the problem solving and such to geoscience problems which would actually help students uh but there aren't that many particularly smaller schools but also universities that have people who are skilled enough to be able to teach that kind of thing there's also some universities that the physics department or the math department would have fits if you started teaching your own you wouldn't be allowed to barb i don't know of any data on efficacy of this but um i can imagine a course like this being harder or you could make it harder than a calculus class but um i think there's a lot of potential for for teaching the math in the context of of a discipline that students are already interested in and they can see why to learn it and so i i think i think the fact that it's harder or not as hard is difficult to evaluate because you don't know what they're asking the students to do but i think in terms of long-term retention and and future problem solving ability if they can see in the context of the problems they're interested in why is calculus important what do we use it for i think it's a great idea personally yeah i think that's a really good point i teach a quantitative analysis class and the students almost every one of them is head first semester calculus but if you ask them like what a derivative is with regard to just the slope of a line or a curve they don't they don't understand it in a in a physical sense and so i think somehow what they're learning in basic math classes doesn't always translate to how they're thinking about geoscience problems and i to me that's a reason to think about whether or not you could teach these classes in in a geoscience department um i have a question um from johnson uh zedal which Barbara is directed towards you but i think maybe other people could jump in as well um which is what types of recruiting methods has hamilton or other colleges and universities employed successfully and how is the geoscience community inspiring high school age students to want to get involved in a geoscience in geoscience as a career path i could i can address the first one i'm just i'm looking over to the side here to see um i think i've just lost his question on here uh so the first part was um what do how do how do departments actually do this kind of recruiting and the others about high school students and i'm just going to defer to pernoti or somebody else about that but i think the thing that has made the biggest difference for departments that i know have who have tried it is to abandon the standard um survey courses in physical and historical geology where if it's this week it's it's glacial landscapes and the next week it's dunes and the week after that it's igneous rocks you know the and try to narrow an introductory course down so that students have some depth in a particular area and can actually do geoscience in a limited way the way a professional geoscience scientists would do it and that's more interesting it's more relevant it's not just learning about geoscience it's actually finding out what geoscientists do and connecting it to societal problems can attract students in a way that you know just looking at looking at dry rocks in a box just doesn't do it so i think at the introductory level that's where you're recruiting students truly and and if you have a great glossy brochure and you bring them into a course that's not interesting and attractive um you've lost the opportunity so i think intro is a really important place for that anyone else like to comment on recruiting i i think i agree with what barb said just absolutely and one of the things if you're not familiar with the next generation science standards that are being implemented in a number of states across the us we're going to have or some of us not probably in texas but we will have students coming in who are used to active learning are used to thinking in a disciplinary and looking at processes and that's if you just look at the standards and look at you know what the way things are being done and you put that in introductory classes you're probably going to recruit more people and you know the other thing is particularly in terms of the quantitative uh it doesn't hurt to recruit from uh freshman in physics and computer sciences and math because all of a sudden you can show them that this is an interesting way you can use this to solve problems that make an impact on society i'll add just a little bit i haven't been a faculty for nearly a decade so i can't speak to the issues of the classroom today but i do remember as a as a fact former faculty my department my colleagues you know would sort of they had relationships with the the local high school where you know they made the connection with the teacher who was potentially teaching something in the sciences and they would find a way to have either their research students or themselves you know have some sort of outreach activities not regularly but at least once or twice a year i also know that uh my own department colleagues some of them were teaching the science education courses with you know for the college of education so those faculty had uh you know tremendous um sort of relationships with those wannabe teachers and many of them would take more geoscience courses to have more depth rather than just you know here's the rocks in a box and here's how i identify them and so i'm hoping all that sort of paid off in the end you know but i haven't been a faculty in a long time so i can't speak to that um i just want to quickly come in um it's 220 which is when we were officially supposed to and but i have a couple other questions so if our panelists don't mind sticking around for maybe five more minutes i'd just like to pose two other questions to you all um one is from james napin it's um actually i addressed to chris um i suspect chris knows the data well but historically many of our graduates have been employed in the energy industry as these jobs disappear in the coming years as they're doing right now is it realistic that other opportunities will evolve on a similar scale in other professions it's a it's a good question and and the mining sector actually has been tackling this one and their view has been as people retire or there's downsizing those jobs are gone forever those occupations but that they're hiring folks with geoscience expertise and they're defining sort of new jobs when you start getting things like machine learning where the mining industry and the oil industry seem geoscientists spend 80 percent of their time data rambling um that's not a real good use of their of their intellectual power that they're if they can combine their geoscience with perhaps other areas economics or or or engineering or what have you then the nature of those jobs change and the occupation portfolio within these companies evolved so there will be opportunities the the shedding that's going on right now uh given these current circumstances is uh is is is obviously going to be very large um and it's hard to judge you know if the end is going to go up how much of that is actually going to be folks that just retire out of the system versus prospects for the the younger professionals uh and new graduates that's to be seen but i i will say that the the mineral sector certainly is is is more optimistic even in this current situation because they just see it's just a fundamental change all the occupations we know of as geoscientists are gone they're dead stop talking about stratigraphers and and seismic interpreters and things like that those are gone it's going to be something different we don't really know what they are um but it is multi skill the breadth of skill is going to be the key for those students to combine those abilities so they both lane shift but also can solve problems in very different ways um and maybe i'll just ask one last question um this is from um kugo gutierrez and the question is experiential learning is one approach that has proven to be useful and conveying a number of skills including quantitative ones but sometimes this approach is limited to faculty experience based on research i'm wondering if you know of any successful collaboration between faculty or colleges and industry in designing some of these experiential course content and what might be some good practices for doing so i can say that we have had courses at the university of texas at austin we have close contacts obviously with the oil and gas industry and we have had and still have courses where there's strong collaboration between industry and the classes everything from you know them providing data sets to you know coming in and judging or participating in classes fieldwork things like that i don't know how common that is but i would say that experiential learning can be done by you don't have to be doing research there's lots of things you can do and that i would really recommend if people are not familiar with the circ site that they explore because there's a lot of things there that would be extremely helpful if no one else would like to add anything i'd like to thank our speakers and our panelists for a really excellent first session our schedule is that we're going to take a short break and we're going to return for our second session at 250 and that session will be what are the best practices for integrating analytical skills into geoscience curriculum and i think we will end it there and we'll be back in 25 minutes thank you thank you