Earth Data Science Corps - ESIIL STARS

Earth Data Science Corps is now ESIIL STARS - Check out this program here.

The Earth Data Science Corps, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a $1.2 million three-year project that builds capacity to teach and learn earth data science at schools serving communities that are historically underrepresented in STEM. The project includes a combination of online data skills training for students and faculty, career focused webinars and project based learning. Faculty training builds capacity to teach earth data science at each school.

While the demand for earth data science skills in the workforce is exploding, the availability of programs that teach these in demand skills is not equally distributed. Specifically, smaller schools that support communities that have been historically underrepresented in STEM, often lack the capacity to teach technical skills due to limited resources, faculty expertise and challenges associated with adding new curriculum. This lack of capacity in turn yields a lack of diversity in the technology sector.

Participants are trained through online workshops for students and faculty as well as a paid applied internship and full semester-long Earth Analytics Bootcamp course for students. Through the whole program, students learn the core data science skills necessary for careers in earth data science, including Python programming, Git/GitHub for version control and collaboration, and JupyterHub for working reproducibly in the cloud. Faculty are then able to teach these skills to the broader population of students at their schools.

This program is aimed at undergraduate students who are new to data science and interested in applying it to earth and environmental science. It is offered to participants at each partner school and CU Boulder, providing experience to students with previously limited access to earth data science educational resources, laying a solid foundation for future earth data science work. Students are not expected to have any previous programming experience before beginning the Earth Data Science Corps program and undergraduate students in all majors and class levels are eligible.

The program includes a suite of activities to empower students to pursue earth data science jobs and build sustainable earth data science educational programs at partner institutions. For the first half of the summer, faculty and students from each institution attend a series of data science workshops hosted by Earth Lab, aimed at teaching the foundations of earth data science. Faculty attend teaching specific events including a Software Carpentry Instructor Training. In July and August, students apply the scientific programming skills they have learned through an applied paid internship. In the fall, students take an online Earth Analytics Bootcamp course that provides a deep dive into core earth data science skills. Throughout the program there are career development webinars and workshops on topics such as scientific communication, resume writing and interviewing, and building a professional online presence. All project educational materials are shared on Earth Lab’s open education portal and YouTube channel.

Education Research: Understanding Approaches and Effectiveness of Online Learning With Diverse Student Groups

The EDSC is founded in evaluation and assessment activities that assess the effectiveness of student learning while also improving the program over its three year span. As a part of this effort we are studying the effectiveness of online learning of earth data science skills and the associated barriers to diverse groups learning these skills.

*EDSC Student skill gain in different technical and science area before and after participating in the summer program. Source: Earth Lab 2020 Survey.*

This project is funded by NSF Award #1924337.

What Our Program Includes

Events provide exposure to career options in earth data science

Panel: Careers in Earth Data Science - In this event four professionals, who ranged in background from recent graduates to mid career, talked about career opportunities and challenges in earth data science.
Webinar: Reproducible Science - In this event, Dr. Max Joseph offered tips on getting started with research compendia, which allow for bundling analysis associated with a research project to ensure that other can install the same software dependencies and run the same workflow on their machines.
Workshop: Science Communication - This training exposed students to the message box as a way of communicating science to different audiences using a core message that relates to a given audience.

Faculty and Student workshops teach scientific programming in Python

Project Based Learning Through Paid Data-Intensive, Group Based Internships

The final internship project supports project-based learning. Here students solidify skills learned in workshops. They also learn how to tackle a real-world data problem and develop collaboration skills and communication skills as they present their work to their peers. These applied skills in turn add to their professional portfolio which will make them more marketable on the job market.

Each year, the program hosts 20 students from four different institutions.

Explore the range of topics studied by our student cohort, including live presentations and blog posts.

The Earth Data Science Corps was a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation that ran from 2020-2022, and is no longer active at this time. If you are still interested, you can still check out the ESIIL Stars program, which teaches similar content, features a group project, and runs for five months.