News - Mission Earth
GLOBE Youth Geoscientists Complete Internship
Eleven interns, or GLOBE Youth Geoscientists (GYG), complete a two-week internship at University of California’s Botanical Gardens. The internship program combines GLOBE, career development experiences, college preparation, and youth development/leadership strategies to build a replicable summer geosciences experience for rising seniors in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in California who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. The program concentrates on using GLOBE protocols for data collection and as the research investigation platform. The GYG interns include a diverse group of urban high school youth including 1 senior, 9 juniors and one sophomore from Oakland Unified School District, West Contra Costa Unified School District and Antioch Unified School District.
Adjustments and modifications were made due to the pandemic. The two-week program was originally designed to be 100% in-person at the UCB Lawrence Hall of Science (location of the 2019 NARM) but was redesigned to be a hybrid model whereby students engage in distance learning in the morning with afternoon in-person field work at the UCB Botanical Gardens. As a team, GYG interns work together and learn more than a dozen GLOBE protocols in the areas of atmosphere, pedosphere and hydrosphere. Once proficient, small teams create unique research questions, devise an investigation plan for their team and carry out their research which cumulates in a poster presentation to local STEM professionals.
The UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) manages the program and provides two full-time GLOBE-trained facilitators. GLOBE Mission Earth (GME), and the UCB Department of Chemistry, provides facilitator training and support throughout the planning and implementation phases of the program. UCB’s College and Career Academy Support Network (CCASN) provides career development experiences and college preparation duo the interns. WestEd serves as the prime contractor in the program. This program is made possible through a National Science Foundation IUSE Grant.
The GYG program builds on nine years of promising implementation by WestEd/UCB of GLOBE Partnership and engages LHS as a critical partner with science expertise and decades of experience in implementing summer science experiences for youth. When the GYG program continues in 2022, this year’s participants will have the option to serve as leaders for next year’s program.