Geoscience undergraduate career preparedness

I am interested in studying the design and effectiveness of undergraduate programs, and one subset of that interest is students’ career perceptions and preparedness and how those change over their years in a geoscience program. I designed and implemented a survey to annually measure the career preparedness of undergraduates here in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University. The survey would be straight-forward to implement at other schools. 

The survey helps me explore the specificity of students’ career plans and whether their ideas about potential jobs change over time. The first couple years of survey results have shown that some students have very specific job titles in mind while other students have very vague or unformed career plans. The degree to which a student’s career plan is formulated does not seem correlated with time spent in the program, suggesting that the undergraduate program itself is not currently driving career planning. 

Targeted, career-related interventions have only just begun here in our department, and the next years of data will help us understand if those interventions (like a class on career exploration) give students a more specific career plan. This study allows us to see gaps in our program, address them, and assess the effectiveness of the changes we make.

Click on the image below to expand the poster to learn more about the initial data from this project.