Improving Industry Based Skills in Environmental Studies At a Community College

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New York’s Hudson Valley is experiencing a growing demand for well-trained STEM graduates, with a particular need to meet the workforce demands of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP), one of the area’s largest employers. The NYC DEP oversees a three-reservoir system that provides more than 8.5 million people with clean, unfiltered, drinking water from Catskill-Ulster County and Delaware reservoirs. Projections estimate that approximately 46% of the 1,044 employees currently budgeted for in the Bureau of Water Supply division will be eligible for retirement by 2026. Ulster County, additionally, is the first county in the United States to adopt a Green New Deal to mitigate climate change and practice environmentally sustainable actions with an emphasis placed on education and job training to equip the future workforce. Creating workforce ready technicians to meet these needs is the goal of SUNY Ulster’s Environmental Studies program and the Industry-Based Skills for Undergraduate Success (IBSUS) project. IBSUS will satisfy the growing industry need for technicians in the environmental field and help produce technicians with a research problem solving mentality. The project will satisfy the growing demand for skilled STEM graduates in the Hudson Valley, NY region, address the hard/soft skills gap in job applicants between graduates and industry expectations, and enhance recruitment of underrepresented groups in STEM, with an emphasis on females.The IBSUS project will leverage on-campus services, industry partners, and the larger ATE community to create a set of project deliverables that will have an ongoing impact on students, faculty, and the greater campus community. This combination of resources is expected to improve student success and ultimately better prepare students to enter the workforce. The project will improve student retention and career readiness in the SUNY Ulster Environmental Studies program through three sets of applied learning activities in the form of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) designed to introduce and utilize techniques and technology to identify and solve environmental problems, foster a collaborative environment, and help students develop effective communication skills. The IBSUS Project Team will streamline the General Biology II lab curriculum in collaboration with the NYC DEP to emphasize applied learning in the reinforcement and further examination of prioritized lecture topics to introduce/reinforce hard skills and competencies. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the Nation's economy.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.