Becoming Familiar with other Disciplines Through Hands-on Experience

Abstract:

Transitioning to a new discipline can be challenging because of the need to quickly assimilate new skills and knowledge that others brought up in the field took years to develop. While reading and taking classes help to add knowledge, hands-on experience is key to developing your new skill set. Fieldwork is one obvious way to gain experience. Fieldwork provides intimate knowledge of your new found discipline, which is one component of your skill set. However, fieldwork is normally for a short period of time and very focused, which does not quickly provide the second component of your skill set, that is, insight into how your discipline fits in the big picture of solving problems. Academic workshops and internships can help provide the additional experience to bring any young researcher into this higher level of understanding. As a specific example, I'll talk about a summer workshop I recently attended called CIDER (Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research), which is open for students to apply for every year. This workshop provided the opportunity to learn a working knowledge of other disciplines in geology, and helped to expand my view of geophysics' place in solving real problems. The workshop is a month long, the first two weeks of which were lectures and tutorials of every discipline represented. The second two weeks consisted of new research on projects that were proposed by the attendees. The attendees select which of those projects to participate in, and join a team to work vigorously for two weeks. Teams may continue work after the CIDER workshop for presentations at AGU (as in my case) and has potential for publication later. Why this workshop succeeds in advancing young researchers' understanding is that different disciplines work side by side on their research project. Students need to be made aware of this workshop, and other workshops and internships like it, to provide this added hands-on experience.