Lamont-Doherty’s Secondary School Field Research Program: Institutionalizing outreach to secondary school students at a soft-money research institute

Abstract:

The Secondary School Field Research Program is a field and laboratory internship for high school students at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Over the past 11 years it has grown into a significant program, engaging approximately 50 high school and college students each summer, most of them from ethnic and economic groups that are under-represented in the STEM fields. The internships are based on research-driven science questions on estuarine physics, chemistry, ecology and the paleo-environment. Field studies are linked to associated laboratory analyses whose results are reported by the students as a final project. For the past two years, we have focused on the transition to an institutional program, with sustainable funding and organizational structures. At a grant-driven institution whose mission is largely restricted to basic research, institutionalization has not been an easy task. To leverage scarce resources we have implemented a layered structure that relies on near-peer mentoring. So a typical research team might include a mix of new and more experienced high school students, a college student, a high school science teacher and a Lamont researcher as a mentor. Graduates of the program are employed to assist with administration. Knowledge and best practices diffuse through the organization in an organic, if not entirely structured, fashion. We have found that a key to long-term funding has been survival: as we have sustained a successful program and developed a model adapted to Lamont’s unique environment, we have attracted longer term core financing on which grant-driven extensions can be built. The result is a highly flexible program that is student-centered in the context of a broader research culture connecting our participants with the advantages of working at a premier soft-money research institution.