News Release

Growing the next generation of geoscientists: Rutgers reaches out to school children

$1.7M grant from NSF funds 'Newark Geoscience Scholars Program'

Grant and Award Announcement

Rutgers University

NEWARK, N.J. – It’s a great time to be a geoscientist. The work is interesting, the jobs are plentiful, and the pay is good. Yet few students today are aware of the opportunities in geoscience, not realizing there is more to the field than rocks and dinosaurs.

Being launched this fall in three Newark high schools with a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Newark Geoscience Scholars program is designed to expose city students to the current-day wonders of and career possibilities in geoscience. “We want to show students that there are careers to be made in geoscience. That it’s not just about dinosaurs and stratification in the Grand Canyon, but that it’s something viable, current and useful to society,” explains Alexander Gates, geology professor at Rutgers University in Newark and developer of the Geoscience Scholars program.

Today’s geoscientists are found working within the oil and mining industries, with government agencies studying water and air pollution and the protection of natural resources, and in environmental remediation. It is the area of environmental remediation that Gates consider particularly pertinent for Newark students. Not only is it the fastest growing field for geoscientists in New Jersey, but with multiple Superfund sites in the immediate area, he says, there is a real opportunity for students from the city to play a role in improving their community.

“That’s one of the things that I’m hoping will come out of this program,” says Gates, “that students from Newark will major in geoscience and become involved in helping to improve the environmental health of their city.”

The demand for geoscientists has become distinctly acute as college enrollments in the field have dropped sharply in recent decades. In the early 1980s, those earning geoscience degrees approached 10,000 annually, but by 2005 only about 2,400 undergraduate and 1,500 graduate degrees were granted nationwide. Not only are fewer people studying geoscience, many of those currently working in the field are nearing retirement age, adding to the demand for new geoscientists. Gates reports that he gets several calls a month from employers looking for geoscience graduates offering starting salaries up to $80,000.

Not only is the demand great, the field is one that also is aggressively seeking minority candidates. The NSF grant funding the Newark program is part of a national effort to increase diversity in the field. According to the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, geoscience has the poorest diversity record of all science and engineering disciplines in the United States. In 2000, only 1.3 percent of geoscience bachelor's degrees awarded nationwide went to African- Americans and 3.1 percent went to Hispanic Americans. During his seven-year tenure as chair of the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Rutgers-Newark, Gates says that not a single Newark student has majored in geoscience.

As with the other sciences, an inquisitive mind and quantitative ability are good skills to posses for a career in geoscience. But as a science that deals with spatial structures, geoscience also appeals to those with the more artistic ability to visualize things, says Gates. “One of the really nice things about geoscience is it’s a mix of science, engineering and art, plus you often get to spend a lot of time out in the field.”

Similar to the science education program Gates oversees at five Newark elementary schools, the Geoscience Scholars program will be conducted by Rutgers-Newark graduate students.

The elementary school program, funded by a $1.9 million NSF grant, was launched last year to assist fifth-grade teachers with building a greater interest in the sciences. This year, Rutgers-Newark graduate students will be working with sixth-grade teachers and involving the students in a meteorological study. As part of that study, weather stations will be set up throughout the city so students can learn about weather forecasting and the tracking of pollutants. In its first year, the program reached about 300 students and is expected to reach another 600 students this year. Working with a new set of teachers each year, Gates says, the goal is to eventually immerse elementary school students in hands-on science work from kindergarten through the 12th grade.

The Geoscience Scholars program will begin this year in the ninth-grade classrooms at Barringer, Science Park and Technology high schools in Newark. In addition to classroom exercises, the program will consist of a Geoscientists Explorer program in conjunction with The Newark Museum, after-school sessions focused on career opportunities, and a “Summer Institute” at Rutgers-Newark. Stipends also will be provided to students who decide to major in geoscience at Rutgers-Newark so they then can become mentors to students in the elementary and high school programs. In addition to The Newark Museum, program partners include the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute, Kean University, URS Corp, Langan Engineering and ExxonMobil.

The Scholars program will make use of several educational resources Gates has helped develop to increase public awareness about the geological richness of the New Jersey-New York region. Among those resources are the “DynamicEarth” exhibit at The Newark Museum, the Frank Lautenberg Visitors Center at Sterling Forest, and the Highlands Environmental Research Institute at Harriman State Park in New York.

One special resource Gates is developing for the Scholars program is an “Oil Game.” In that game, students will be challenged to determine how to increase their chances of hitting oil using a model drilling field and geological data. In yet another exercise, they will be asked to establish the flow of pollutants in ground water and predict how long it will take for that water to recover.

“What we want to do,” says Gates, “is to get students to actually think about being scientists, to show them how science is useful in everyday life, and to allow them to discover that science is something they can do and succeed at.”

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