QuEST goal 5 was to “initiate actions and recommendations to recruit, retain and inspire students with quantitative interests and capabilities“. Marketing can be labour intensive and expensive. Departments do not habitually consider “self promotion” or “marketing” as part of their mandate. However if recruiting into QES programs is a priority, then “visibility is everything” and effort must be expended to make progress.

The recommendations in this section are for marketing actions that could be taken in 2024 and beyond. Actions already taken as part of the QuEST project are summarized in the marketing activities page.

The EOAS Department has realized this and has committed personnel and resources to communications and public outreach activities. The communications team is certainly well-occupied and these marketing suggestions are not meant to say their priorities should change. Instead, consider them as starting points for discussion about how priorities could evolve.

Since “marketing” takes time – and a particular point of view, it may be worth considering increasing the resources for the communications team, and/or partnering with the Faculty or UBC on specific marketing initiatives.

R14. Quantitative EOAS first year course

Discussion and recommended actions related to developing a first year quantitative Earth sciences course are on a separate page.

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R15. Establish a sustainable marketing strategy

1. The Department would benefit from additional dedicated support for marketing activity because suggestions in this section can be labour intensive. A few work-learn students, especially during summers when they work 20hrs/week) would be a good start. As of fall 2023, this challenge is recognized and students are contributing in various roles. However, a new set of priorities with recruitment high on the list would improve the visibility of, and enrollments in, Quantitative earth sciences – and other EOAS degree specializations.
   
2. Add a QES faculty member or graduate student to the EOAS communications team and give them a mandate to focus on QES outreach and recruiting priorities.
   • There are many current (fall 2023) outreach activities but few have any relationship to the quantitative disciplines, except perhaps activities related to climate and climate change.
   • If attracting students into QES degree specializations is a departmental priority, then public relations and outreach activities should reflect this priority.
3. A marketing vision and corresponding strategies focusing on under-enrolled specializations is needed. It should include specific actions, timelines and impact assessments, and should be circulated among faculty, researchers and students, discussed, and approved. Include: who to target, what to “sell”, content, activities, connections, one-off and ongoing commitments & costs, etc. This is “non-trivial” and could take several focused, full-time weeks to prepare. Sources:
4. To incorporate JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion) perspectives into a marketing strategy, refer AGI’s “vision and change” document (Mosher and Keen, 2021), which has sections and discussions about recruiting for a “diverse and inclusive community“.
   • Oceanographers Johnson et al., 2016 discuss strategies for increasing diversity in ocean science workforce, thus “cultivating future global ocean science leaders who collaborate effectively to make discoveries, achieve solutions, and develop technologies“.
   • Other sources are needed, focusing on atmospheric sciences, quantitative environmental sciences and geophysics.
5. To heighten visibility, make more use of brochures, business cards, a couple of informative presentation slides, etc., ideally prepared by the EOAS communications team.
   • There needs to be material that students can take away whenever EOAS faculty, staff, or students engage with students or public.
   • For example, when presenting in courses outside EOAS, the contributor needs a handful of brochures plus a couple of slides to add to their presentation. Here is an example of a prototype flyer which needs to be improved.
6. Geophysics faculty rarely teach in EOAS first year courses. A colleague at Colorado School of Mines noted a similar shortcoming and agreed that that “problem” should be corrected.
7. Further labour market research is needed identify concrete examples of diverse career opportunities for QES graduates, with results delivered to QES faculty and articulated on “career” pages of the EOAS website.
   • This was planned for summer 2023 but the student chosen could not be hired because of immigration or work visa limitations.
   • CTLT and Career Services should be able to contribute data, although UBC does not have accounts with commercial labour market analytics data (eg. Lightcast.io).
   • There are public sources such as BC labour market statistics, and probably other Canadian sources.
   • Also, LinkedIn research would be worth while.
8. Increase the visibility of EOAS QES degrees and research at conventions, tradeshows and meetings.
   • This does not necessarily mean running a booth or bringing presentations. Consider sending a communications team member with a mandate to meet students, peers, industry personel, companies; to learn about hiring trends, desirable skills etc., and to hand out business cards, brochures, even EOAS / QES “merchandise”.
   • These types of activities would all contribute to both visibility of EOAS and our QES programs. This would also bring regular information back to EOAS about the relevant worlds of work and academe and how they are evolving year to year.
   • A first (inexpensive) target should be Vancouver’s Roundup. A communications team member needs to go with a plan of action and priorities for reporting back to the team and hence to the Department.

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R16. Attract BSc students when they choose their degree

There is plenty of scope here for creativity and energetic engagement. A few examples include:

1. Be visible in 1st year math, physics, and chemistry. This is already being piloted in Math; see the small TLEF grant awarded to Math Dep’t.: “Math and EOAS Collaborate to Improve Climate Education at UBC“.
2. Be more active in Science Undergrad Society https://sus.ubc.ca/. Many avenues of engagement. Consider including an EOAS undergraduate student from one of the clubs on the communications / PR committee to engage, report back and identify or suggest opportunities.
3. Engage with more FoS activities – eg https://science.ubc.ca/science-rendezvous-2023. Both undergraduate and graduate students could contribute.
4. Be more visible at Meet Your Major – May 24, 2024.
5. Explore UBC science social media – facebook, instagram etc., and leverage those streams. If we already have an EOAS student coordinating EOAS social media channels, perhaps they could contribute, tag, link to – or whatever – the various other UBC channels.
6. There are undoubtedly other avenues for engaging with incoming and existing students. This deserves additional research, prioritizing, and action-planning, ideally with priority on quantitative Earth sciences, mandated and supported by Department admin.

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R17. Showcase student learning and experiences

There is much that is excellent and attractive about being a student in EOAS, so the department could do more to celebrate these strengths in ways that will attract new or transfer students. Many recommendations under the “Marketing” banner are related to showcasing EOAS as an inspiring and rewarding place to earn a BSc. Some items in this list overlap with more detailed recommendations elsewhere but collecting them here hopefully emphasizes the low-cost opportunities to make the Earth sciences – and particularly the quantitative Earth sciences – more visible and attractive.

1. The communications team could do with a designated “student liaison” person. Their job would be to look for opportunities to showcase undergraduate life, activities and experiences, especially focusing on priorities – which would, of course, evolve (quantitative Earth sciences being a current priority).
2. Showcase types of experiences  rather than specific products generated by individual students. Possibilities include:
   
   • Showcase clubs and social or networking events. E.g., draw on existing information from clubs and configure it for public consumption, to demonstrate “what it’s like to be in this community“. Interacting with clubs and members could part of the mandate for an EOAS communications team student liaison.
   • Examples of course work, especially projects, such poster titles from EOSC 212. Should these be updated each year? Perhaps not, but it would be easy if only the titles were listed since the list is usually circulated to faculty at end of term 1 anyway. However fetching and adding to EOAS website would need to be a designated “duty” for a web content person on the communications team.
   • What types of data do students encounter and analyze? What kinds of code do they produce? Examples could be drawn from many 3xx and 4xx ATSC, ENVR or EOSC courses. Only some examples would be needed, and annual updates would probably not be necessary.
   • Similarly, what types of problems are addressed and solved? Examples could be drawn from 3xx and 4xx assignments and labs. 
   • Experiences such as field trips, interactions with community, guests visitors, seminars, etc. need to be show-cased.
3. Existing and new web content about students needs to be re-purposed to inspire rather than simply to inform. Details are on the “Website improvement” page.
4. Feedback from students could be selectively presented.
   • Selected mid-term or end-of-term survey results, including paraphrased quotes about open ended feedback
   • Comments about why/how current students chose their options have been incorporated across the EOAS website. These are titled “A student-inspired comment“. More could usefully be obtained casually from students in a classroom or lab setting or from feedback survey data.
5. Departmental public relations work could work more closely with students, perhaps by building relationships with clubs. Mutually beneficial activities would be needed.
   • For example, an EOAS communications team member could attend or participate in club or departmental events (such as honors thesis presentations or course-based poster-presentation sessions) with the goal of taking a few photos and adding a corresponding item to EOAS social media and website pages.
   • Or, a club member could be invited to participate in a PR event or action by contributing a personal experience, anecdote from courses or work, or offering a suggestion for content.
6. EOAS social media  content producers could engage more regularly with students by briefly visiting labs, field schools, or other undergraduate events and activities. The purpose would be to showcase what’s fun, inspiring and worthwhile about being an EOAS student.
7. The ways undergraduates are engaged within the EOAS Community need showcasing. Those doing paid work or volunteering; those on committees; those contributing as teaching assistants … any instance of undergraduates contributing to the benefit of EOAS could be demonstrated in a segment about “contributing members of the community“.
8. It is possible that an EOAS blog site (e.g. “EOAS undergraduate affairs” or “EOAS community activity” would be more efficient to maintain than the EOAS website, which is more cumbersome to update than the standard UBC WordPress-driven blogs.

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R18. Foster partnerships emphasizing QES

1. The Communication Director and their role & team could be more visible to EOAS faculty, more responsive to QES faculty interests and priorities, UBC stakeholders and the public.
2. Follow up from the SCIE 001 and Climate Math experiments (guest speaker and climate context for first year mathematics). Will this continue? What’s needed to sustain the partnership? Is the initiative visible enough to colleagues in EOAS and other departments, and UBC more generally)?
3. Also mentioned elsewhere – but EOAS and ATSC courses should be made more accessible to physics &/or other students.
4. Connect regularly with other BC post-secondary schools. BCIT, SFU, Douglas College, UNBC, UVIC, U. Van. island, Yukon U., others? Some institutions are visible at the Roundup convention held in Vancouver every January. Do this via “articulation” but also by actively connecting with physics, computing and geoscience instructing faculty.
5. Co-ordinate with Mining Matters in outreach efforts to students and public. This needs a little research, but a benefit is that contributing to existing initiatives is quicker/easier than instigating our own similar efforts.
6. The organization MineralsEd has a volunteer program called “Geoscientist in the Classroom“. Example at LinkedIn here. Explore the MineralsEd website for other examples of outreach activities. Should EOAS (& GIF & MDRU, etc.) emulate or participate? Partnering with existing outreach organizations is way easier than initiating. But requires Dep’t incentives.
7. Promote more aggressively degree minors & combined options in EOAS disciplines such as the geophysics minor. These options need to be more widely visible within FoS (especially physics) and possibly engineering.
   
   • This requires a person with such a mandate. They would develop creative and inspiring marketing tactics and connect personally with relevant departments and individuals.
   • More flexibility regarding required courses for QES degree specializations may be beneficial, for example permitting alternatives to math & computing intensive EOAS courses. Define specific goals or opportunities (such a geophysics minor for physics or astronomy students) and adjust requirements to enable – and even attract – such students.
   • “Recruiting to Geosciences through Campus Partnerships” by Cervato, 2021 is an example of how such marketing can be successful.
8. An “Introduction to geophysics for geotech/mining students” course or module (online and/or in person) may be a way of connecting with other schools & colleges, and possibly the professions. Could such a course or module be part of the engineering certificate programs?
9. Establish more concrete connections to Canadian Earth Science community. Could include relating PME activities & exhibits to Canadian contexts (e.g., using resources at CFES, the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences), engaging EOAS communications team with the Canadian and BC contexts, highlighting these connections on the PME and EOAS websites via the “Outreach” main link, and likely other creative ideas.
10. Develop opportunities to experience QES in action as a 1-hr lesson, or 1/2-day workshop, or multiday enrichment opportunity.
    • This is not a well developed idea but was inspired by Blake et al., 2017, who describe a 4-day geoscience workforce skills training and enrichment component of the program that consists of geoscience exposure, preparation, apprenticeship, and experience.
    • The Department could leverage experiences gained running the VSP (Vancouver Summer Program), and explore whether such an experience could be delivered during jumpstart week, as part of ‘Geeringup, or perhaps in some other form that involves all EOAS disciplines – perhaps a summer experience coordinated by PME as an outreach activity.
11. PME could leverage their creative strengths to increase exposure to quantitative aspects of EOAS and Earth sciences generally. For example, outreach activities in meteorology and atmospheric sciences are described in Changnon, 2004.
12. Connect with UBC’s “Science 101” initiative to contribute an Earth Science, and perhaps even a QES, perspective. Given the target audience of this initiative, this is less about recruiting into QES and more about visibility of Earth Sciences generally among the general public. This is something PME could consider as an avenue of outreach.

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R19. Engage in active outreach to high schools and Vantage

Engaging with the K-12 school systems is challenging. Many ideas above are applicable or adaptable to the K-12 sector. The PME has good relations with schools, but mostly the K-7 grades. The few thoughts here are meant as starting points for discussion rather than concrete, actionable suggestions.

1. QES faculty and students need to partner with PME to introduce QES content accessible to school workshops, teachers and casual visitors including families.
2. Partnering with UBC’s GeeringUp was suggested just prior to COVID. They have diverse outreach pathways and are well organized, but re-connecting will require a point-person.
3. Engage with high schools is an attractive idea, but we know from experience that it is challenging for several reasons.
   • Schools are badly under-resourced and activities beyond their classrooms face logistical and financial challenges.
   • Teachers are tightly constrained by provincial curriculum – they have little autonomy.
   • Visiting classrooms should be feasible but requires commitment of EOAS faculty and significant organizational effort.
   • Some precedent suggests that results of engaging with schools can be unexpected – even counterproductive – if not done with care. See Lyon et al., 2020.
   • However – working with PME to emphasize QES aspects in all workshops should be possible if content creators can be found.
   • Possible actions include:
     • Presentations at teacher professional development days;
     • connecting and engaging with high school guidance counselors;
     • direct presentations to students in their own spaces;
     • website and hard copy information materials (see “To heighten visibility” above).
     • Ask EOAS faculty with school-aged kids to connect with specific teachers. They can then ask about connecting with relevant school staff.
     • Based on experience, participating on Parent Advisory Committees is the best way to get to know the teachers and staff. However, even as a multi-year president of the PAC at our school, we still found it difficult to create meaningful opportunities for school students to engage with EOAS disciplines.
4. For school kids, focus on people, not “science”. Let the science emerge from inspiring stories about who did what and how they impacted society, eco-systems, communities,, etc. Brian Fitzgerald of the Mount Washington Observatory found that middle school kids were more interested in the people doing the science, and less about the science itself. See his presentation abstract, delivered at Earth Educator’s Rendezvous, 2023.
5. Opportunities at Vantage College: The degrees that Vantage college students can pursue after their Vantage year are summarized at Possible Specializations (Majors) After your First Year (last viewed Dec. 2023). The following notes arose from the Jan 14th, 2021 meeting with BG, FJ, PT, CH, SL. 
   • Adjusting Vantage curriculum may involve rather bureaucratic and perhaps political issues. Probably not “low hanging fruit”, but likely worth identifying the correct people to contact. Ask FoS Assoc Dean?
     
   • Recruits & families are very career-oriented. Preferred programs students want to enter are Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Statistics.
   • Science programs and core courses as of Dec 2023 are listed here. Courses are “basic” and tightly scripted – not very flexible.
   • The SCIE 113 course (First-Year Seminar in Science) may be a point of opportunity since EOAS does contribute instructing time.
   • Forestry and Land and Food Systems are expected to become options, while Arts has backed out.
   • Shandine Pete is the current (2023/24) EOAS point-person regarding Vantage.
6. Questions re. Vantage to resolve:
   • Can EOAS factor more prominently in the project courses VANT 148 & 149?
   • Who teaches the Vantage version of SCIE 113? Could EOAS take that on and incorporate QES, climate or other EOAS content into reading and activities?
   • Would a Vantage-focused version of eosc110 (involving more computing, math & physics/chem) be worthwhile? Practical?
   • Are “guests” from EOAS in Vantage courses practical? Worth while? Just prior to the COVID pandemic, this was considered by Brett Gilley (teaching at Vantage) and Christian Schoof (glaciology and climate modeling). The notion needs re-booting.

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R20. Alumni engagement

Alumni engagement for EOAS (particularly the QES graduates) needs rethinking. This is a “bigger picture” task for the department.

1. Can the department engage with alumni without going through UBC alumni “system”? For EOAS that has been through the Faculty of Science Assistant Dean, Development and Alumni Engagement (Allan Berezny as of November 2023) . See also https://science.ubc.ca/alumni. However, this has proven slow and unreliable.
2. Explore creative ideas from the literature, for example Ashline, George, 2017, who developed a network to provide students with information and inspiration, and to support lifelong learning through the development of collaborative relationships between alumni and faculty and students. 
3. Regarding alumni profiles: The Alumni survey used to obtain professional profiles to showcase (Sept 2022) yielded only one out of 14 contacted (with FoS alumni support).
   1. A template for a professional profile pages was made for F. Jones.
   2. There is a more general version of this survey targeting others. It was intended to be sent to BCGS and KEGS executives. It could still be used but should be shortened.
   3. OR – individuals could be contacted for a 1/2 hr interview using 2-3 of those questions. See the Central Washington University example for precedent and interview questions.
4. Industry contacts were gathered (36 to date) in a spreadsheet: (industry, gov, academic) = (21, 6, 5), and (atsc, geop, envr, geol, ocgy) = (11, 14, 1, 1, 2). Followup by adding to this using a LinkedIn search, then treat as a source for alumni (and other) contacts for showcasing. (Spreadsheet on NextCloud:  ...\QUEST\marketing\showcase\industry contacts221107.xlsx)
5. Gather public-domain alumni information based on LinkedIn data (eg here). Whether this would be ethical needs discussion. It could result in content more like a table or list rather than full profiles. In fact, it may be more appropriate than full-on profiles of individuals, and certainly more doable since contacting individuals would not be needed.
6. Showcase pathways into geoscience occupations using an efficient model developed at Boise State University. The assignment details and results were presented at the EER 2023 workshop by A. Egger, and are summarized on our activities for exploring careers page. It should be possible to implement this procedure without UBC’s permission. It only requires a 20-30 phone or zoom call, with 3-4 questions to standardize the information gathered.

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R21. Enhance EOAS website content for QES recruiting

Details for this category of marketing recommendations are on their own blog page.