Opportunities

During this summer, representatives from the American Institute of Physics (AIP) reached out to us for assistance with one of their projects that is part of their inaugural Research Agenda. In collaboration with AMS, one of AIP's member societies, they are engaging in a feasibility assessment to explore a pilot tracking and reporting system on Climate, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and Meteorology degree programs at U.S. institutions for higher learning. As you know, physical scientists play a critical role in responding to challenges brought about by global climate change, but currently, there is no systematic effort to monitor and track the pipeline of undergraduate or graduate training in climate, atmospheric, oceanic science, and meteorology. However, AIP has collected this data for physics and astronomy enrollments for more than fifty years. You can review that data here.

The data collected will be used to better understand where students receiving bachelor's degrees in atmospheric sciences are going and how to support those students. As they start this project, they are focusing only on undergraduate programs, and we are hoping you can help them collect this data for the UCAR community.

AIP is asking for a single point of contact from each of our Member universities who can provide data on the number of bachelor's degrees awarded, even if the students are enrolled in different departments. This person may be the undergraduate advisor or sponsor of the undergraduate AMS chapter. Please click here to submit contact information.

AIP will also ask for the names and contact information of those graduates. Collecting the names of graduates is crucial to determining student outcomes. AIP will contact the graduates six to twelve months after they graduate to ask them what they are doing.  AIP has been conducting similar research with physics departments for decades, and they have a strong reputation for protecting that contact information and using it only for the survey.

If you have specific questions about this project or AIP, please reach out to Susan White at swhite@aip.org.

Thank you,

Aneka