Research Experiences in Solid Earth Science for Students (RESESS) Go Remote in 2020: Interns successfully conduct geoscience research projects and build community online

Abstract:

Research Experiences in Solid Earth Science for Students (RESESS) is a research-focused program dedicated to increasing the diversity of students in geosciences. Over the past 16 years, RESESS has evolved to best support interns from under-represented groups by providing a summer research experience including a unique, multi-tiered mentoring model, funding for national conference attendance, presentation opportunities, option to return to the program for additional research experiences, cohort building, and extensive professional development training. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘safer-at-home’ directives nation-wide, we further enhanced the design of our programs to successfully launch RESESS and UNAVCO’s two other internships to remote platforms instead of hosting interns in-person as was typical in our program’s history. By offering the full length and robustness of our programs through a remote platform, we kept our promises of education, career advancement, monetary compensation, and community connection to our full 2020 intern cohort, which included six first-year RESESS interns from across the United States. We present our strategies for successfully retaining and supporting undergraduate students while they participated in intensive geoscience research projects from their home locations. We also describe our methods for further leveraging the new virtual communication situation to engage colleagues from around the country to maximize our students’ networking opportunities with the ultimate goal of broadening participation in the Earth sciences. Our 2020 remote RESESS program was externally evaluated and focused on students’ professional, social, and mentorship outcomes from the remote internship experience. We present these results and compare them to previous data from the in-person internships to discern differences in students’ and mentors’ experiences and outcomes between the traditional in-person internship and the remote internship.