Global Climate Change: Implementing AMS Curriculum at San Jose State Univeristy

I was a participant in the AMS 2012 summer climate diversity workshop at AMS (as well as at field sites of NASA and NOAA) in the Washington, D.C. area. I found the program for the workshop (guest speakers, field trips, discussions about the AMS climate curriculum and associated materials and methods for delivering it to students) to be excellent – very interesting and useful. But a highlight of that week, for me, was meeting and interacting with the people – the others participating from a wide variety of educational institutions around the U.S., and staff at AMS and the places we visited. It was good to “compare notes” with my peers who have been teaching in the sciences at other colleges and universities. It was also very helpful to talk to those (few) who have already been offering the AMS curriculum at their schools.

San Jose State University is the oldest of the 23 campuses in the CSU (California State University) system, and hosts an amazing ethnic diversity among its approximately 30,000 students (undergraduate and graduate level) now enrolled. (This is about 10% more than ten years ago.) The main part of the campus is right in the heart of the downtown San Jose metropolitan area. Through its seven colleges, SJSU offers 134 bachelor's and master's degree programs, with 110 concentrations. The Department of Meteorology and Climate Science is the only such program within the CSU system. Hundreds of undergraduate students yearly take courses offered by the department, and there are about twenty graduate students in the program, at various stages along the path to the master's degree. I teach an upper-division science course for the SJSU Meteorology and Climate Science Department, entitled “Global Climate Change”. I plan to begin implementing the AMS curriculum in the Spring 2013 semester.