FIRED UP: An immersive early field experience program to build community, support inclusivity, and foster large-scale research ideas

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This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Colorado Boulder will test the efficacy of a first-year graduate student program designed to promote the inclusion of students from diverse identities as well as provide discipline-specific training in field methods. Currently, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology graduate programs in the US lag behind other biological disciplines in the representation of PEER students (persons excluded due to ethnicity and race). This project aims to address this issue by piloting a program that aims to increase PEER recruitment, create a cohort community, improve the sense of belonging among students, increase early access to expert field methods training, and expand training to address ecological questions relevant to global environmental change. Challenging issues related to environmental change, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, require a diverse workforce of highly trained biologists who can collaborate across disciplines and produce solution-oriented scientific approaches. While our program is tailored to the disciplines of ecology and evolution, the basic elements of the program could be adapted to many STEM disciplines and broaden the impact of this approach.The PIs of this project will work to increase PEER graduate student recruitment efforts through connection with multiple conferences and networks that promote student diversity. The design of the graduate education model draws on theories of human motivation and personality (self-determination theory and sources of self-efficacy) to target psychological needs that, when satisfied, foster well-being and success in graduate school: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. By providing an early immersive field experience for a cohort of students the summer before they begin graduate school, our program will work to remove the barriers that fieldwork poses to PEER students interested in ecology while providing critical early-training and cohort building to increase retention and students’ success. The project will take advantage of the well-established Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (NWT LTER) program and the Mountain Research Station at CU Boulder. Evaluation of the program will focus on understanding how programmatic components support students in developing competence in the field and analytical methods, autonomy and independence as researchers, and a sense of belonging within the field. The project aims to publish and disseminate the approaches used to be accessible for a variety of STEM fields in addition to the discipline-specific results in ecological science.The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.