GP-GO: Iowa Environmental Internship Pathways Program

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Geoscience, Environmental Science, and Environmental Engineering, collectively referred to as GEO-STEM herein, lie at the interface of science and society. Many of the grand challenges of the 21st century, including access to clean air and water, biodiversity, and the impacts of global change, rely on the skills of the GEO-STEM workforce. Unfortunately the United States is facing a critical shortfall in trained personnel to enter the GEO-STEM workforce, and what students are entering are often underprepared with the skills required to meet these challenges.

Additionally, whereas the negative impacts of GEO-STEM industries and topics (resource extraction, access to clean air and water, etc.) fall disproportionately on communities of color, most individuals from these communities have been historically excluded from GEO-STEM fields. This is not only detrimental to the future of remediation of these negative impacts, but also limits the ability to unlock the talent available in this important and growing sector of the U.S. workforce.

This project will develop a GEO-STEM Learning Ecosystem (GLE) in the State of Iowa that will increase student preparedness to enter graduate school and the GEO-STEM workforce, and will do so while increasing the number and diversity of GEO-STEM students at the University of Iowa. These goals will be accomplished through a series of extra-curricular and outside-of-the-classroom learning, internship, and professional development opportunities provided by educational, government, and industrial partners.

Pressing societal issues such as access to clean air and water, soil health, preservation of biodiversity, and the impacts of global change are all fundamentally GEO-STEM concerns, and to address these issues as a nation we must be able to produce a highly skilled GEO-STEM workforce ready to meet these challenges. Recruitment, retention, training, and mentoring students through critical transitions in their educational pathways are important components to address the overwhelming need for increasing the number of students entering the workforce.

The PIs propose a series of collaborations, partnerships, and opportunities for a new GEO-STEM Learning Ecosystem (GLE) in the State of Iowa focused on the critical transition from university graduation to the workforce. The development of a GLE in Iowa will provide the education-government-industry partnerships that are required to generate the authentic, real-world, work-based learning that is so critical to training the next generation of GEO-STEM students.

The project will create an environmental internship program that will be sustained past the lifetime of the grant that will provide students with important experiential learning opportunities outside of the classroom and outside of academia that will better prepare them for eventual transition to the GEO-STEM workforce.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.