Lake Watershed Geosystems: A Meteorology Student’s Perspective in GEOPATHS

GEOPATHS, the National Science Foundation-funded research project at Plymouth State University, was created in response to higher education institutions’ desire to educate undergraduate students to be leaders in developing STEM fields. Colleges and universities aim to create scientifically literate students by increasing STEM graduates by 50% in 2020, and then double that number by 2025. This project aims to increase STEM graduates by helping students learn scientific concepts earlier in their undergraduate career and more permanently through real-world and relevant applications. In the first year of this grant (2018-19), students from the Meteorology and Environmental Science and Policy programs were engaged in extra-curricular problem-based, field-intensive, applied interdisciplinary science lessons that supplemented existing geoscience curriculum at PSU. The project also serves as a peer-mentoring program between the participating students and professors.

Eight students at Plymouth State University were accepted to the GEOPATHS project in 2018-2019. Most students found that participation in the GEOPATHS program was valuable for learning proper measurement techniques, experiment design, and data quality assurance. The project included several field trips to various locations in New Hampshire to do work related to the Geosciences, including work with emerging technologies such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and HOBO sensors. In one case, we designed experiments, collected data, and analyzed this data when we set-up HOBO sensors to record a heat map of our campus and the surrounding forest to determine if urbanization had made an impact on heat distribution. A strong emphasis was placed on experiment design and data quality assurance.

The final component of the GEOPATHS project at Plymouth State was a funded summer internship experience where participating students could pursue meaningful opportunities with organizations in their field of study. Some of the other 7 GEOPATHS participants were placed in internships related to their field of study in states such as Vermont, and New Mexico, and several were also connected to research projects done by Plymouth State. The author used this opportunity to complete an 11-week internship with the Mount Washington Observatory Information Technology department. Working in the mountains and forests of New Hampshire, the internship primarily focused on meteorological instrumentation. The author developed new skills and technical knowledge in the area of coding, which will be highly valuable in the study of Meteorology. Through participation in the GEOPATHS internship, the author was able to reaffirm a passion for the study of Atmospheric Sciences and learned firsthand what will be needed in order to be successful in the author’s field after graduation.