Increasing Student Opportunity by Creating Innovative Minors with Minimal Cost

The career outlook for meteorology is rapidly broadening and becoming inherently more interdisciplinary and multifaceted. As stated in the AMS Statement for a Bachelor’s Degree in Meteorology (2017), our field encompasses a broad and diverse workforce that connects the Earth system with society, and thus, most jobs in the field now lie within the intersection of several roles. Because of this, students are seeking new ways to combine their professional interests and make themselves more competitive in our evolving profession. One way to help students achieve their goals is to broaden meteorology education by offering innovative, operations-focused minors that both pair well with meteorology as well as open the doors to a variety of career paths. However, since resources are finite, the key to success is developing the new minors without the expense of creating and offering several new courses.

At ERAU (Daytona Beach Campus), we found in many cases that cohesive blocks of coursework already existed, but they courses were not formally coordinated and designated as a minor. While simply completing the coursework is beneficial to student education, having the coursework identified as a minor on the students’ official transcripts gives them a defined record of accomplishment that more readily stands out on resumes. Over the past four years, we have helped coordinate across different departments and colleges the development of three new operations-focused minors (with a fourth in development) that only required the creation of a single new course. All other courses either already existed or only needed slight modifications. The result is that our students now have (or will soon have) access to minors in Emergency Management, Communications and Broadcast Media, Geographical Information Systems, and Airline Operations, in addition to the existing more traditional minors (e.g., Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Business Administration). Each of these new minors works exceptionally well with meteorology and helps increase student opportunities with little additional cost.

The goal of the presentation is to share our experiences in developing the new minors as well as to hear thoughts from representatives of other institutions as well as employers for possible new minors.