[silence]
- Hi, everyone. Welcome to the first Earthquake Science Center seminar
of the new year. We have a nice lineup of seminars
for you coming up in the upcoming few months.
As a reminder, as we begin, please turn off your cameras.
Mute your microphones. All the functions are available
through the menu bar at the top of your screen in the new Teams.
Live captioning is also available. Click the three-dot More button
and choose “turn on live captions.”
Before we get to today’s seminar, there are a few announcements.
Next week’s seminar will be by Francois Renard of the University
of Oslo speaking on the anatomy of earthquakes in the lower crust.
As I said, we have a good lineup of speakers into March.
As always, if you have suggestions of speakers that you’d like to share
with the whole center, reach out to myself or Tamara Jeppson
with those recommendations, and we’ll try to get them lined up.
Other announcements of upcoming events.
The next all-hands meeting for the Earthquake Science Center
is in two days on Friday, the 15th, at 11:00 a.m.
Those of you involved will have gotten a calendar invite for that.
Upcoming soon is the annual Northern California Earthquake
Hazards Workshop, and that’s hosted by the ESC.
And, of course, this year, it will be all virtual, and it’s taking place
from February 2nd through 4th. It takes the place of the
Wednesday seminar that week. Or it will …
Yeah, so the registration for that is still open, and I believe
there’s a link in the chat. Yep. If you scroll up in the chat,
Susan Garcia has pasted a link to register for that if you haven’t yet.
I’ll remind everyone who’s doing a lightning talk, you should have
gotten an email from Sarah Minson that the slides are due by the 19th.
So, that’s the end of those announcements.
Today our speaker is Eleanour Snow from the
USGS director’s office Youth and Education in Science.
If you have questions – or, I’ll hand it over in a minute to Steve DeLong,
who will introduce Eleanour. But, as a technical matter, if you
have questions for Eleanour, please feel free to enter them in the chat.
Tamara and I will be monitoring that and can
insert them if they’re appropriately urgent.
So please feel free to write them in as they come up.
You can also raise your hand, and we’ll call on you.
And, of course, we all love to have human contact these days, so if you
want to turn on your camera and microphone and ask the question
yourself, that’s always very welcome. So I will now hand it – and, as another
point, as usual, we’ll be hanging out a little bit after the – after the
formal seminar recording ends. So please feel free to stay on
afterwards and do a little meet-and-greet, chat with each other,
chat with Eleanour, continue the conversation then.
So, with that, I will hand it over to Steve DeLong to introduce Eleanour.
- Thanks for joining, everyone.
And really pleased that Eleanour Snow can join us today.
Eleanour’s first job as a geologist was at USGS Menlo Park.
She was an intern with Allan Lindh’s Parkfield project.
And so, for those with a long memory, part of her summer job was preparing
the punch cards for the computer program that had to run overnight.
She was an undergrad at Pomona College at the time.
And she went on to earn a master’s studying the Bishop Tuff and a Ph.D.
at Brown University in minerology and microstructural geology.
Eleanour spent most of her career as a professor in the geosciences,
first at the University of Arizona, then University of South Florida.
In 2006, she turned to outreach and mentoring full-time at the
University of Texas, first with Earth science teacher professional
development and then with GeoFORCE Texas, a large outreach
program targeting mostly first-generation, mostly minority
youth in south Texas. Eleanour was in charge of
developing a college and career mentoring program for the students
and supporting them through college and into careers.
Some of these students interned at USGS Menlo Park in the early 2010s.
Eleanour earned a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science,
Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring for that work in 2015.
In 2016, she joined us at the U.S. Geological Survey, where her position
as manager of youth and education programs allowed her to continue
the focus on opportunities for diverse and talented youth in STEM fields.
In addition, Eleanour represents the Department of Interior and the USGS
on several federal committees focusing on STEM education.
She’s the lead of the DOI Interagency Youth Team and the co-lead of the
Federal Interagency Working Group for Inclusion in STEM.
The title of Eleanour’s talk today is USGS Youth and Education Programs
with an Eye Toward Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
I’ll turn it over to you, Eleanour. Thanks.
- Thank you, Steve. And, hello, everybody.
I’m really delighted to be here. I was asked to talk about two things,
really – the work that I do with youth and education in our programs,
but also how to really engage diversity in the programs that you
all are running in your centers. So the talk is kind of divided
into two parts. I’m going to start talking about
the JEDI work and best practices and then go into the programs
that we have that we’d like to help science centers engage with.
Just to start out, my team is very small.
I have two permanent employees – Annie Scott and Laura Corey.
And I have this year two fellows – Sheree Watson from the AAAS
Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, and Kama Almasi, who is
a teacher working with us in the Einstein Educator Fellowship Program.
We really work hard in all of our programs to promote diversity in
science and in education to provide opportunities for internships to students
and to help centers find good interns and then to work with youth outreach
so that we can really capture that next generation of potential scientists.
I wanted to give you a sense of what we do within OSQI, and I’m not
going to go over all of this, but when I – when I came here,
there were a few things going on in the youth and education space.
And, over the course of the last four years, we’ve really expanded
a great deal the kinds of things that my office does.
And most of it we do with – through collaborations with other
centers because we are a tiny team. But this gives you a sense of,
in our programs, and in the youth and education and outreach space,
what all we’re doing. And I’m going to talk about a lot of these today.
So let’s start with justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
And personally, I think JEDI is one of the best acronyms
anybody’s come up with in a long time.
Doing – working for good. I like that a lot.
My work here, as Steve mentioned, started actually way back at
University of South Florida when I had an NSF grant to
work with 7th- and 8th-grade girls in science.
And I have moved more firmly into that field over the years.
I am currently the co-lead of the Interagency Working Group for
Inclusion in STEM, which is a federal interagency working group
that encompasses about a dozen different federal agencies.
It’s underneath the federal STEM education plan, which is this
book cover on the right here. And, for those of you who are
not aware of how these things get going in D.C., this is all in the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is a White House office.
The current lead of that is Kevin Droegemeier.
And Biden hasn’t named a lead yet. Obama’s head of OSTP reported
directly to him and met with him every day.
So I’m hoping that Biden has a similar close relationship to his lead scientist.
Underneath OSTP, there are a bunch of committees that
formed to work on various things. And the Committee for STEM
Education – CoSTEM – is headed by the head of NSF and the head of NASA.
And then, underneath that, the Federal Coordination of STEM Education,
which wrote this plan and manages the – basically the work of CoSTEM –
how do we – how do we work on STEM education initiatives,
that all falls under the sub-committees, of which IWGIS is one, and the other
four are one on strategic partnerships, one on computational literacy,
one on convergence, and one on transparency and accountability.
I’m the only DOI representative right now on any of these committees.
So, if anyone’s interested in joining one of them, that would be great.
So what do we do? The Interagency Working Group on
Inclusion in STEM is working on three things that are wrapping up about now.
And then, of course, we’ve got other things coming up in the future.
But I’m going to share with you today some of the best practices and policies
for things that really work to drive the needle in diversity in federal agencies.
We just – we are just in the final editing stages of a report on that.
And there’s some really good ideas in there.
So I’m going to share some of those with you today.
We also did a large data dive to figure out where things stand across the
federal STEM agencies, and I’m going to share some of the federal data on
the USGS workforce, but we did this across all federal agencies,
and that’s almost ready to – that is actually being published.
And then we also worked in a scramble last summer. [chuckles]
We got together across federal agencies with what people were doing with
virtual internships as we developed them – you know, as you know,
we were building that plane while we flew it.
So we are gathering now those experiences and putting together
a report about how virtual internships work, what do you really
need in place to make them work. And that should be coming out soon.
Because we think we’re going to be needing those in the next year.
So that’s where all that starts from. So here are five best practices or
policies identified through this work. And the first one is to form
strong partnerships. USGS has partnerships with
some minority-serving institutions, and I know some of you are
engaged in some of those and are interested in forming others.
It’s really important, when you do that kind of work, that you’re
bringing something to the table. We’re not just dropping by at a HBCU
to recruit, but we’re actually engaging with the faculty and the students there,
committing time. It’s important to consider, when you are bringing,
for example, a student in, to think about a cohort model.
If you’re bringing in – as our friends at Woods Hole have found [chuckles],
if you’re bringing in the one Black student to a summer internship
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that can be a problem.
And so think about, if you want to work with a minority-serving institution,
bring two or three students into your center from the same –
the same group at the same time. Mentor throughout the year.
And don’t forget to engage the faculty. And this is a picture of a student at
Tennessee State University doing some water sampling without his –
without his protective gear, but the Water Science Center
in Nashville has installed USGS monitoring equipment
on campus at Tennessee State.
So that’s a great model for deep engagement.
Align diversity inclusion goals with the organization goals.
And that’s just because diversity makes better science,
justice builds stronger communities, inclusion is good for business –
it makes better and happier employees, and equity improves morale.
So – and I know that the hazards mission area has really been
a leader in this across USGS, which is terrific to see.
Target your outreach. So my office does engage with diversity seminars.
And many of you all have joined us on those.
The SACNAS meeting – the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos
and Native Americans in Science, the National Association of
Black Geoscientists. When you engage directly
with organizations that are targeting diversity, you can
improve your own diversity target efforts.
Adopt inclusive hiring practices. I think one of the most impactful
things that I heard in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder this summer
is résumés accumulate privilege. And what that means – what I mean
by that is that, when you’re looking at a recent graduate, and you see
straight A’s, you’re most likely looking at somebody who came from
an affluent community, went to a really good high school,
had opportunities as a kid to go to science camp.
Those privileges accumulate in résumés and show up as really strong résumés.
But students who didn’t have that opportunity as a young kid are often
just as talented and can bring things to the table that you’re missing.
But you might not see them if you’re looking at GPAs first.
So pay attention to those kinds of things.
Educate the hiring team about bias. Consider redacting names.
I’m sure you’ve seen there’s a lot of data out that names – identical résumés
with ethnic names or with female names get lower graded.
So you can consider redacting names in the first evaluation.
Recognize that some experiences might not be possible for all candidates.
Field camp is kind of a privilege to be able to spend the whole summer
spending a lot of money instead of earning it.
So think about those kinds of things when you’re
thinking about inclusive hiring.
These are the data that – from FY19 from June of 2019
for USGS STEM employees. And you can see that under-represented
minorities and women are very under- represented [laughs] across USGS.
And so, a best practice with policy is to monitor and assess and hold
accountable your leaders for the goals that you’re making and
the changes that you want to make.
We know where we’re starting, to let’s see how we can end in a better place.
And finally, be able to examine your own culture and your own biases and
have uncomfortable conversations. And there’s a couple of really
nice things going around. One is a film series called
Can We Talk? by Kendall Moore. She’s a – she’s a documentary
filmmaker at University of Rhode Island.
And some of you may have seen some of her films or parts of some of
her films at either the AGU or the GSA meeting this last year.
She is also available to bring those films and those discussions to groups
who want to have those difficult discussions.
This book that you see here – What If I Say the Wrong Thing? –
is my reading list for this spring. I think we can always learn and
continue to learn, so book groups might be helpful.
In your communities, in your office places, build community and listen
and learn from the people that are trying to teach you about
diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think there’s always a first impulse
when somebody says, you know, it really offended me when you
did X, to defend yourself. Well, I didn’t mean to be –
I’m sorry – you know, I’m not – I’m not prejudiced.
I didn’t mean that. Don’t go there first.
First, go to, tell me more. I would like to understand more.
I’d like to learn from you about why that was offensive.
Because we don’t always recognize our own biases.
We use things – words, phrases – that we picked up when we were kids.
And they’re still part of our ethos, and they might be highly offensive
to some people, but we don’t recognize it because it hasn’t
been brought to our attention. So pay attention and listen.
So those are the best practices for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And, if you’d like to have a discussion about any of those now, before we
move on to some of my – the YES programs, I’d be happy to do that.
[silence]
I’m not seeing anything in the chat.
So let’s look at some programs.
So the Youth and Education in Science office manages internship programs,
and we also helps centers manage other internship programs.
The ones you’re probably familiar with are the Cooperative Summer
Fellowship Program – and this has been called the NAGT program.
So you might be thinking about it as the NAGT, or the NAGT program.
This is the longest-standing geoscience internship program in the country.
It goes back to the mid-’60s. And, through that program,
we accept nominations of excellent students from the National
Association of Geoscience Teaachers. And then, at my end, in my office,
we invite proposals from scientists who would like to hire these students
in the summer. We match the student applications to proposals
for interviews, and then the scientists make the hiring decisions.
We expanded that program to include students from the Ecological Society
of America who have good ecosystems field training and also with a
partnership with the Geographic Information Systems – GIS –
Certification Institute for students with GIS certification.
And that came out of the Western Geographic Group there in
Menlo Park asking us to bring in some GIS-certified science students.
So we changed the name because it’s broader now than just NAGT.
And that program is ongoing. We’re just about to have our panel
meeting and make the matches between students and projects
for interviews next week. There’s also a program for graduate
students that is cooperative with the National Science Foundation.
And, in that program, NSF actually funds the student to come and work
at USGS for up to six months. My office facilitates the partnership
with NSF and tries to help scientists and students meet each other
in a couple of ways. On our website, which is GRO
at USGS – graduate research opportunities. We post opportunities.
If you’re trying to attract a student, you can send us a proposal,
and we’ll get it posted there. Students hopefully come there and
look and find scientists that way. We also hold a webinar that is
advertised by NSF to graduate students twice a year to introduce
them to what we’re doing. And we go around to meetings and
try to share that whenever we’re on college campuses as well.
So far, since 2016, we’ve had about 106 students come to USGS through
that program, representing 60 years of work [laughs] at the USGS.
Sixty years. And all for free for USGS.
So a great way to get great internships done.
We are also piloting – we were intending to pilot [chuckles]
in the spring, before COVID shut everything down,
a program for college students on the autism spectrum.
And this came to our attention through the work we do with STEP-UP.
And we’ll talk about that one a little bit later, but we learned that
college students with autism are employed at a very, very low rate.
Only 15% of college graduates on the spectrum get jobs in their
field after graduation. And that’s just dismal because
these are often brilliant students, but they have difficulty with social
interactions, and they don’t interview well, and it’s very difficult for them
to get jobs. So we’re working with Colorado School of Mines and their
disability services offices, and the earthquake office right there,
to pilot this program. And hopefully we’ll be able to
bring some people in. It’s not really doable as a virtual
internship because the whole point is to get the students in office settings
and get used to that setting. So what we’re – we hope to
be able to do that soon. We’re also doing it with
George Mason University in the D.C. area. And we’d be happy
to expand it once we know what we’re doing across other places.
- Eleanour, may I interrupt about that with a quick question?
- Absolutely.
- Is the – is the idea of that program – well, will it be sort of accompanied by
the attendant framing and necessarily, I think, for mentors to be given the
resources to handle this kind of diversity of people on staff that
they may be having under them? Because it seems that maybe a
big component of why – what that barrier is, right, is people’s discomfort
or unfamiliarity with dealing with certain populations of people.
Are there resources being devoted to the mentor side of that as well?
- Yes. Yeah. I think that’s a great question, Austin.
And that is the plan. It’s one of the reasons why we’re
piloting this with two universities that have really strong disability
services offices and specific services for students on the spectrum, so that
part of the initial pilot will be working with that office to train the mentors
and provide the right environment. We did one tiny, little pilot –
one student, one lab [laughs] here in D.C.
And it was really interesting for the – for the advocate from the university
to come by and say, you know, okay, for this student, this particular
desk setting wouldn’t work because it’s too noisy.
It’s too – somewhere quieter, and a corner would be better for this kid.
So those kinds of things are really important, and that’s why
we’re starting this with those offices.
Thanks for the question. That’s a good one.
We also are – help other people facilitate internship programs.
USGS has had three fairly longstanding partnership pipeline programs
with minority-serving institutions. One with University of Puerto Rico
at Mayagüez. That’s been going on for more than 30 years.
One at City College of New York for about 15 years.
And then Tennessee State University that’s been going on
for 10 years or more. So we keep advocating for
more funding for those and try to help push the MOUs for those.
These are generally started by scientists who want to do something with this
local school and with this – with this – with this population of faculty
and students. And so one thing my office can do is take the paperwork burden
off of you and make sure that the legal team looks at the agreements,
and you don’t have to manage all that back-and-forth. We’ll do that for you.
We also help people set up community college partnerships.
And, if you haven’t used it yet, you really should get on the
Virtual Student Federal Service. That’s a State Department program
that we’ll help you find and use, but that asks college students
or graduate students to volunteer to work on federal projects.
They have to be doable outside of the firewall, but, boy, we’ve gotten some
great work from VSFS, and we’re happy to share that information
on how to do that. So one of the ways we do this – and I think Austin’s
going to put this link into the chat for you, and then I’ll walk you through
a few things on our internship resources SharePoint site.
We’re using SharePoint more and more now to start to share things
across USGS and get resources into people’s hands. So this site …
Do do do do.
We have resources for interns. This is really great.
We have in here some bios of interns from last summer.
So, if you have an intern you want to feature here, let us know.
Some things for them – how to get the most out of your internship.
Some – how to be a good advisee.
But what I really want you to see down here is this learning series
for young scientists. And I think you might be able to
use this with any mentees that you have in the early stages of their career.
This was created by a geoscientist, Anne Egger, who’s actually now
the head of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.
And it’s a whole series about research. What is research?
How do you think like a scientist?
This past summer, we used the episode on responsible conduct
of research for a webinar that we did for interns this summer.
Each of these units has a little movie and then additional reading
things that you might choose. So I think it’s a great resource.
And if you have young scientists who are interns
you’re mentoring, send them there.
We also have resources for mentors, and we have some information
about how to be a good mentor and other things there.
And then, down here, each of our different programs.
So the graduate student program, the undergraduate program,
how to participate with Virtual Student Federal Service, and then
how to build partnerships with colleges and universities.
And so what do these partnerships look like? How do they work?
And then MOUs that are templates you can – you can build on if you
want to build something. So that’s built for people across USGS to use
as they develop these kinds of programs. And feel free to dig in there.
Let’s see. Back here.
We also – my office also manages the USGS participation at diversity
conferences. The SACNAS conference and the – and the
NABG conference – the National Association of Black Geoscientists.
So you’ll see from us coming up in the early summer – late spring,
early summer – information about inviting scientists to participate in
those conferences and to mentor students at them.
Both of these organizations – well, I shouldn’t say that.
SACNAS has campus groups all across the U.S.
And so, when you’re visiting a college campus, you might look for
an organization like SACNAS on campus, and, in addition to
engaging with the geology department or the department you’ve come to visit,
see if you can visit with some of the diversity organizations
that there might be on campus as well.
We also produce educational resources for teachers and for learners.
And one of the things that we’re really interested – we’re actually doing
three new things this year that I wanted to alert you to and let you –
invite you to participate in. One is, we really want to get more data
into the hands of teachers and learners. And teachers are really asking for this.
So, if there are data sets that you’re producing that you think would be
great for teachers to get their hands on, please let me know.
We’ll try to put it into a format – help you get it into a format,
or at least write a filter that pulls out [chuckles] the right data that a teacher
could handle on various subjects. Teachers are clamoring for that.
We’re also working on education rapid response.
And actually, this came out of a conversation that I had when
I was down in Pasadena visiting the earthquake folks down there.
They mentioned that one of the biggest challenges that you have is when there’s
a big earthquake, you get a lot of calls saying, can you come talk to my class.
And you’re all too busy handling the earthquake to do that.
So we’re actually working with partners in D.C. on something we’re calling
Education Rapid Response that, in the immediate aftermath of
a natural disaster, that USGS and NOAA and AGI and IRIS would
immediately post information for teachers about that disaster.
And then also, we would have a slew of experts who are willing to talk to
classrooms, and we would have a bunch of time slots pretty quickly –
within 48 hours is our goal – that teachers could sign up for
to have a scientist talk to their classroom. So that was a great idea.
We actually have a virtual student – federal service guy working on the
interface now to pull information and create the interface that the
teachers might use to find scientists. So you’re going to probably see,
by the end of the spring, me reaching out and saying, hey, you want to be
on our list, in case there’s a big earthquake, to talk to people.
And the other thing we’re doing that’s new is a series that
we’re calling What On Earth. That’s that picture in the lower right.
What on Earth is geologic time? The goal of this series is to be a very
visual educational series, just one page, front and back, one topic.
And the geologic time one is actually going to have five in a series.
So we’re open to series. The first one is just basic.
What is geologic time? The second one is, what is absolute time?
The third one is, what is relative time? And the fourth and fifth are both
geologic sections of the Grand Canyon – one for younger learners
and one for older learners, so they can color it in and – so the goal of
these is to, in the long run, have a whole series of these very quick
learning exercises that teachers might pull and give it as a background.
We’re studying this tomorrow. Read this and be prepared
with questions. Or the general public might grab.
You know, I really want to know what is a surface earthquake wave?
And there’s a one-page thing they can pull and look at that and
think about that hazard. So we’re also very interested in people
who might want to participate in creating those, giving us a list of, what
are the most important things, but also creating some of the content for those.
We’ve also working on some educational campaigns.
You may have seen the Powell150 project campaign last year.
Some of you guys participated in that. We’re rolling that into a
Be an Explorer, where we’re tying the 1869 Powell to 1969 lunar landing
to 2069, perhaps a Mars landing. And another Grand Canyon.
So we think that educational campaigns are a great way to pull the public
into our science by getting a hook that’s kind of exciting.
This – last year, one of my fellows, Sheree Watson, who’s the
AAAS fellow, worked on citizen science projects.
And she built a SharePoint site that is a resource for crowdfunding and
citizen science projects that can help people who want to build them
figure out best practices for that. She also created citizen science
projects for Native youth. There were three of them that she
worked on with partners in Hawaii. One was using these little
Raspberry Shakes. Then she’s working with Jefferson Chang at HVO,
and he’s got a group of kids who have these little miniature seismographs,
and they’re putting them out all over town to register the small earthquakes
that are happening in the magma chamber.
And so that’s one of the citizen science projects.
And he’s got Native kids involved in that.
Another one is with the ecosystems people out there looking at a native
plant that is under attack of a parasite. And so they’re having kids gather data
on those plants as they see them. And then the third one is with
the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center.
And it is a mobile app that allows people to report changes that they’ve
seen in their landscape that might be climate-related.
So there’s a lot of opportunity in citizen science to really develop
some deep engagement. Obviously, you guys know about
that because Did You Feel It? is the biggest citizen science project
[chuckles] in the – in the USGS.
But there’s a lot of other ways to do that too.
The citizen science and crowdsourcing SharePoint site is here, and I think
Elliott’s going to put that link into the chat.
You’ll find there data on the projects that we have, a toolbox for how to
build a project, and then resources that really talk about, what is citizen
science, and how can it be used. So please, if you’re interested
in building something in that realm, dig in there.
My office also works on outreach and education activities.
And we have a outreach working group. It’s a community of practice across
USGS that meets every other Tuesday at 11:30 Pacific time.
It met yesterday, so there’s the schedule for you.
That group shares resources on what they do in a classroom.
So, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, hey, I need – I would like
you to come talk to 3rd-graders about dinosaurs, and you don’t know how to
do that, hopefully somebody’s shared something in this shared space
that allows you to just pull that and take it and go.
We’re hoping to, through that site, have common messaging when
we reach out to classrooms. And a really easy way for you to
implement either classroom visits or on-site science festivals.
So we’re sharing an idea bank there. The other thing we’re doing this year
that we’re about to pilot, actually, with some scientists and teachers
in our Midwest region are virtual classroom visits.
This pandemic has created a lot of challenges, but it’s also
created opportunity. And one of them is to get to more classrooms.
So you could get a great earthquake scientist in Louisiana.
There might not be any living there, but you guys are – you guys can
get there virtually. So we’re going to pilot virtual
classroom visits this spring. And, again, have resources in there
for scientists who want to participate to make it easy for them.
And then a mechanism for teachers to find them.
And our outreach page SharePoint site is here.
And I want to show you a couple of things on that site, and I think that
Austin’s putting the link into the chat.
But, on that site, we have …
The resources for K-12 audiences has things that other people have used
in a classroom on these various topics. So you can dig in there if you have been
asked to do something that, you know, you studied in college, but you haven’t
thought about deeply since then, and you need to present it.
There’s hopefully some things in there to use.
I also have resources there for college visits.
I visit college campuses a lot, and I give a talk about the things
across – mostly USGS, but also across government.
And there’s – the PowerPoint that I use is in there.
You’re welcome to grab it if you’ve been asked to speak
to a college campus, and use it as you will.
Outreach events is not built up very well yet, but we’re hoping
people share what they do in outreach. And the virtual classroom visits
is where we’re trying to build the community of practice for doing this.
And so we’ll share resources about how to do that as we start to
build that initiative up. If we ever get to touch anything again,
we built two augmented reality sandboxes.
And they’re the greatest things ever.
But they’re both on hiatus right now. [laughs]
[silence]
So OSQI – the Office of Science Quality and Integrity also has other
things in the youth and education space that aren’t directly under me,
but I can still connect you to them if you’d like to be connected.
STEP-UP, as you know – you guys have that out there.
You were the second group to ask for that, and I came out to
Menlo Park to meet with you all and talk about setting that up –
I guess it must have been – I’m thinking it was fall of 2018.
And then we hired a new person, and he’s kind of taken over
the STEP-UP program. Chris Hammond is now in charge of that.
It’s in, I think, nine different sites. I don’t think I have even all the sites
down here. But STEP-UP, for those of you who have not been involved
with that or don’t have it at your center yet, this is the Secondary Transition
to Employment Program for young adults with disabilities.
And these are – these are 18- to 22-year-olds who are
still in the school system. They don’t have a high school diploma
because that’s not their skill set.
What they – most of the ones who work at USGS and have been
successful are on the autism spectrum – on the sort of – what they would
call the moderate to lower-functioning end of that.
The real talent that these young people have is
attention to detail in a variety of ways.
And, of course, they’re individuals. They have individual talents.
We’ve had students picking forams. We’ve had them picking earthquakes
at Menlo Park. We’ve had then scanning and uploading reams of data.
And we’ve had them doing – building web pages.
The kinds of things that might be tedious and require a lot of the same
task again and again and again is the sweet spot for a lot of these
young people. And so they come to us through the STEP-UP program while
they’re still in school, and so they’re volunteering, and they’re learning
job skills. And they can be hired as Schedule A employees.
In fact, I think three of – three of these four have been hired at USGS Reston.
The young woman in the wheelchair and both of these young men are
now USGS employees, and really valuable employees at that.
So, if you don’t have STEP-UP in your region, or if you’re in
Menlo Park or Denver or Reston or Woods Hole, and you want to engage
these students in the work that you’re doing, look into that. It’s terrific.
Of course, the Mendenhall postdoc program is also in our office,
and you all are using that really effectively.
And then finally, the Office of Tribal Relations is also part of OSQI.
And they’ve got a couple of things that they’ve done that are really terrific
with Native youth. One of them is this program in Woods Hole
called Preserving our Homeland. And it works with the Mashpee
Wampanoag Tribe hand-in-hand with USGS scientists and tribal elders.
Kids come for a week onto the USGS campus, and they learn traditional
ecological knowledge about their homeland, but also the
geology and the science of the area. And it’s a really nice melding of
those two kinds of – kinds of looking at the world.
It’s the kind of thing that USGS – that OSQI would really love to
replicate in other places. So if you are working – if you’re nearby
with a local tribe, and you’re interested in working with their kids, this model
has been very, very successful as a way to work with Native youth.
So, in summary, I guess my office, the YES office, is – we are here to
work with you. We’re tiny, but what we can do with you is share best practices,
offer programs, advise, and consult with you on a regular basis,
on a ad hoc basis, for things you’re trying to put into place.
We can act as a resource, as a partner. You can be a customer to us [chuckles]
for some of our programs, like the internship programs as well.
But the main goal is, as a entity in science support at USGS,
what we really want to do is help you achieve your goals.
And so, if there are ways that we can do that, that is our goal,
and that’s what we’d love to be able to do.
And that’s the end of my slides. Thank you.
- Thank you so much, Eleanour, for a really fabulous walk-through
of the vast resources that you and your group have developed there.
And I think you’ve probably spawned a great deal of inspiration and
ideas among the group here. So I had some questions for you,
but I will probably first open it up for anyone else who has things
they’d like to ask of Eleanour. Either enter them in the chat
or raise your hand, and we’ll call on.
Feel free to ask a question yourself, maybe as I call on you.
I’ll start with a couple that came up in the chat, just in the
order that they appeared. First, Alan Yong says, regarding
the community college program, hi, Eleanour, I didn’t catch the name
of the other university, but you may want to consider two other academic
institutions in southern California – Cal State Northridge and Pasadena
City College, where there’s strong disabled student services and
physical science departments. So that’s just sort of a …
- Oh, terrific. Thank you, Alan. I see that.
- And then Kate has a question about the intern SharePoint site that a lot
of the interns are not necessarily on DOI computers and outside
of those resources. So are there sort of public-facing and accessible
versions of those really great resources? Or would they need to be channeled
through DOI and SharePoint? - Yeah. So that’s a really good question.
The DOI SharePoint does allow us to build a SharePoint site for
external collaborations. And we do use that with our VSFS students.
So I do have a SharePoint site that is accessible to outside partners.
They do have to be named and invited by name.
So you can’t just make it open to the world.
But I actually hadn’t thought about putting our intern resources there.
That’s a really good idea.
And a relatively straightforward thing to do.
- Great to hear that that is somewhat trivial. [laughs]
All right. So, let’s see. Steve Hickman has his hand up.
Let’s go to that. - Hi. In the interest of seeing faces,
as you said, Austin, I’m going to do this live.
First of all, Eleanour, I really appreciate everything you’ve done.
This is a very inspiring program and an inspiring presentation.
Given us a lot of ideas. Thank you.
- Thank you, Steve. - I had two specific questions.
One is, of course, with the COVID pandemic upon us, you mentioned
a couple things we can do virtually just to get started.
You went through a lot of materials. Are there other things we could
do virtually to get started engaging with students, you know,
and with their professors? You mentioned some of the
secondary school activities. So if there’s some way to sort of
distill down things we can do now to get started and not wait until we
can actually physically be present, that would be helpful.
Maybe just an email – here are some of the ways we can get started.
Rather than just sitting around waiting for COVID to get under control.
The other question I had – that was one thing.
And the other question I had was about international students.
You mentioned Mendenhalls. Of course, it’s very difficult to hire –
almost impossible to hire international students on Mendenhalls, but often
those are the best applicants – most highly trained for particular things.
Are there other programs that you manage that are open to – or know
about – that are open to international students so we can bring international
students into the activities of the Earthquake Science Center?
- So I don’t know of any way to bring international students
into a federal position. Unfortunately.
I don’t know if anybody on here knows if you can
do it through a student contract?
Directly to the student? You can’t do it through
a contract agency, like a Public Land Corps agency.
You can’t have them hire international students for you.
We can’t hire international students in any way.
I don’t know if anybody knows if you can give a contract to
an international student. That is a challenge.
- You know, there are other ways, you know, speaking from the center
perspective, of engaging international students through external co-ops,
but I was kind of wondering about the YES program in particular.
Things that you manage. - Yeah. No, we don’t – we don’t –
we have not … - Okay.
- … cracked that nut. [chuckles] - Okay. Well, thanks.
- [laughs] - And, again, anything we can
do virtually. Great presentation. And thank you for all your activities.
- Thank you. I like that suggestion of sending out
a tip list about virtual things. - Yeah.
- That’s great. And, speaking of tip lists, you’ve shared your
PowerPoint with me. Would you be okay with me
sharing this with the – the PowerPoint with the center?
I think there are a lot of great resources that you summarized in there.
- Absolutely. - That would – okay, that’d be great.
So, let’s see. There’s a quick question from Andy Michael, which – oops.
Just scrolled past. Which is, what programs are good
for interns that work year-round for a few to several hours per week
as opposed to full-time during the summer?
- So, two things are good for that. The Virtual Student Federal Service
is expected to be about 10 hours a week year-round – or, not year-round,
but during the school year. It is a volunteer internship,
and the way that it works is, you build a project description
in the State Department website in about May or June –
May-to-June timeframe. The students apply in July.
You interview and choose students and agree for them to work for you.
So that’s really great. It is not convertible in any way to a hire.
You can also use the Pathways Internship Program to hire students.
And those students are convertible at the end of their internship,
and so you can certainly work with them a few hours a week through the
school year and then keep the same ones on longer in the summer.
Those are, of course, paid internships, and they have to be advertised
and hired through the Pathways Program.
One of the challenges that Pathways has had always is the nationalization
of that program and the fact that you can advertise something and say
you want a student to come – in Pasadena to come and work for you,
and you’re going to get applications from all over the country from people
who aren’t going to come to school in Pasadena.
One of the things we’re working on in that Federal Coordination of STEM
programs is to get the Office of Personnel Management to change
the guidance on student internships and allow us to advertise locally
and choose on a much – from a much smaller pool.
So we haven’t gotten them to make a change yet.
We were sort of hoping, at the end of the Trump administration,
when he was trying to impress people that he was good with jobs,
that they would make that change. But they turned is down. [laughs]
So maybe in the new administration, as we try to create more jobs
for students, we’ll be able to get a little more hiring flexibility
because that would be very helpful.
- Thanks. That’s a nice answer. The – let’s see. There’s a question from
Clara Yoon, and then we’ll go to Steve DeLong, who has his hand up.
Clara, would you like to ask this question yourself?
Or I can do it.
- Yeah, go ahead, Austin. I’ll …
- Okay. I’ll do it since you wrote it out already.
So, thanks for the great talk, Eleanour. What are your thoughts on expanding
the USGS internship pool to older adults who have not
been in school for years? For example, people who learned
about and developed an interest in geosciences later in life,
career changers, people who were laid off from other industries?
Would that help improve diversity efforts, or is the best thing to focus
on students enrolled in school? - Well, that’s such a good question.
The challenge is the ways that we’re allowed to hire.
So one of the things that really works for the NAGT – the cooperative summer
field training program is that we have a partner who nominates qualified
students, and that allows us to then individually hire this particular student.
It’s more complicated when you’re talking about people
who aren’t in school. We’d have to – the easiest way
to do it, in terms of the hiring action, would be to find another partner
who could be a nominator. Some group that we’re working with.
So, for example, if there is a program at AGU or GSA or one of – another
professional society that works with students – or, older people coming back
into this profession at a different time in their career, that group could
become a nominating group. That’s the easiest way,
from a hiring action point of view, to get something like that set up.
I’m also really hopeful that there might be a stimulus package coming out of
the pandemic as part of economic recovery that will allow us to
do a lot more hiring of interns. I’m really worried about losing
this generation of young scientists to this economic disaster.
And so that’s a really good thing to bear in mind if we do get the
opportunity to build new programs as part of economic recovery.
I love that suggestion.
- Thanks for the answer, Eleanour. You’re clearly the right resource
to go to with these questions. [laughter]
Full of ideas about this. So let’s let Steve chime in
with his question. Steve DeLong.
- Sure, thanks. First, I wanted to say thanks to Eleanour.
She was – she’s been really helpful in our center’s efforts to stand up
programs that are responsive to the JEDI objectives.
And she was the first person that I called when we started doing that.
So she’s really helped us a lot. So I really appreciate that level
of connection that we already have with the center.
I have a couple questions. The first one is maybe kind of vague,
and I just wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how we
bring in interns that are not always – have the longest résumé or the
most accomplished students in the – in the pile of applications.
You know, you’ve talked about how we need to think about – you know,
what’s the sort of – the mutual benefit, or the benefit, to the applicants and
the USGS in how we choose. But do you have sort of practical
suggestions for how, when we have a pile of résumés or resources,
we make decisions that are beneficial to the USGS and really help us achieve
some of these objectives of diversifying the geosciences?
- Yeah, I’ve got a couple of suggestions about that.
It depends a little bit on the scope of the hire that you’re doing.
And who’s making the decision. So it’s sometimes common to have a
committee that looks over applications. And, you know, as scientists, we love –
we love numbers, so people will make a rubric and get the scores.
And, of course, the highest scores are going to be those résumés that
[chuckles] accumulate a lot of privilege. So throw the rubric out is a good start.
Another thing that works really well, if you’ve got a hiring committee and then
a – you know, a decision-maker, is to ask the committee for an unranked list.
You want to know who’s qualified. And, you know, you might have
people who try to slip you a – you know, a line – we really like
this person best, but – you asked for unranked, but we really like this person.
If you pay attention, you’ll see that person is almost always the guy that’s
most like everybody else who’s already there. [chuckles]
And so, if you – a bold hiring manager can just say, thank you for your input
and go to the number two or three person who’s also highly qualified.
And another thing that you could do, if you’re hiring a bunch of people,
is to do sort of a combination of things. I kind of call it a draft pick. [chuckles]
So, if you – if you’re hiring six or eight or 10 interns in a summer, then,
you know, go ahead and rank them and pick all the highly qualified ones,
but leave at least two or three slots open for individuals on the committee to say,
I want to pick this person. They don’t have the highest grade point average.
They don’t have the highest this or that. But what I see in there that I’m really
attracted to is – you know, is this statement here or this experience there.
And so let’s give that person a shot. And so that – you know, giving
everybody on the committee a draft pick to choose somebody who might not
be ranked quite so high but might have other things to bring to the table
is another really useful way to pull in more diversity.
- Thanks. And then, if I could just have one more quick question.
One of the things we’re trying to do in the center is expand these efforts
to our – in our admin and our IT and our operational folks.
We have lots of people in our center who – you know, they drive trucks to
the top of mountains and install radio equipment.
- Mm-hmm. - And that doesn’t necessarily –
you know, you don’t see that on someone’s college résumé,
whether they’re good at that sort of thing.
But we know there’s a lot of talent out there.
Do you have any suggestions for how we meet these objectives while bringing
in people for those other roles that aren’t so research-oriented in our center?
- I don’t know if it would be that different, honestly.
The other thing you can do is really think about where you’re recruiting,
where you’re advertising this thing, so you get a really diverse pool.
And that’s a important first step, that you’re not just throwing it out
on USAJobs, but you’re also going to a job fair or showing up at the
community college, reaching out to the classroom or the teacher that you know
is teaching the kind of thing you want your next – your next hires to know.
Those kinds of outreaches can help you find really good people,
too, that might not necessarily stumble upon you.
- Thanks.
- Thanks, Eleanour. This is just really excellent information,
and the resources you’re laying out and the recommendations you’re
giving are extremely valuable for us. And I’m really excited about that.
- Great. - There’s one more question
remaining in the chat. If anyone else has last things –
we got a second one.
So the – let’s see, Devin McPhillips asks, can you offer some examples
of how institutional partnerships are used – so the – are used with,
like, minority-serving institutions, for example, where is the tipping point
for a formal partnership versus just interactions and one-off internships.
- Oh, that’s a really great question.
So the partnerships are a two-way street.
And it’s really important, actually, to have that because I think that
minority institutions are really used to people kind of coming in
and using them [laughs], I’ll just say, without really offering much in return.
So, you know, somebody is writing a grant proposal, and they need to
say something about their broadening participation goals.
And so they come to a – they come to a diverse organization and say,
hey, we want to use you. But they don’t actually provide
anything for that organization. So that’s the first step.
Think about what you can give to them. And one thing that’s been really
successful in – that CCNY does is they have a monthly speaker series
of USGS scientists. The first Friday of every month,
a USGS scientist shows up on campus, before pandemic, and gives a talk
about their science and meets with the students, has lunch with the
students and the faculty, spends a few hours there engaging with
the faculty and the student body. And then builds those relationships
and understanding with the faculty and the student body, so when it
comes time to say, you know, we’d really like to hire some interns,
you have a relationship with them. The faculty know the kinds of
things USGS is looking for. You know – you trust them to point
you towards really good students. So that kind of interaction can
be really healthy. And I think, if you are – if your center is looking to
build a relationship, you know, find some with a really good,
diverse student body that also is teaching the skills that you
want those students to have. And then there’s all kinds of things
you could do – not just a lecture series, but maybe you teach a couple
of sessions in a course. They’re having a course in, you know,
earthquake science, and you go in, and you teach about the newest
software that does analysis of earthquake waves or
something like that. So there’s ways to be really
deeply engaged and get to know the students and the faculty well.
And I think that’s a really good best practice for building those institutional
relationships that can lead to, you know, a longstanding stream
of good talent coming towards you.
- Thanks. Those are really excellent recommendations to sort of expand
the scope of what you do beyond just stepping in and lecturing in a
classroom and really start to engage. And I think, in much the same way
that you are conveying to us what many of these resources are in the
scope of bringing people onto the USGS, we can go on and,
armed with those resources, sort of propagate that information
to other institutional would-be partners and such.
- Mm-hmm. - There are just a couple
final comments. One from Mike Blanpied.
Great answer. It reminds me of a college admissions official who said that they
have a group read a dozen applications, then they turn them over and have
group conversations about which ones they remember.
And those that – the ones they remember are ones that stood out,
often in ways other than the high scores.
And so a sort of follow-up comment, or related, is this – Mark Waldrop says,
I love the résumés are accumulators of privilege.
And I think that is, indeed, a pretty important takeaway point
that is a sort of undeniable point that you make that is worth everyone
keeping in mind all the time. Because we do find ourselves
stuck to following sort of rubrics and numerical measures of things.
- Mm-hmm. - So thank you for arming us
with that perspective about how to go into these issues.
So I think, with that, there are no more questions in the chat
and no more hands up. This has been a completely fabulous
and excellent presentation and discussion.
So I think everyone should sort of unmute and maybe
turn your cameras on. We can thank Eleanour with a round
of applause for talking to us. Thanks very much.
- You’re welcome. Glad to be here.
[applause]
- And, with that, this will conclude the formal seminar.
So we can stop the recording. But, as I said earlier, anyone who is –
who would like can stay on, continue the discussion,
and do a little meet-and-greet here. So thanks.