Participant Support Costs - GP-IN: Graduate soft skills development through mentoring pre-university students through diverse geoscience

The ways in which the geosciences are of critical importance in modern society range from the environmental impacts of a transition to low-carbon energy & increasingly strategic mineral and rare metal resources that are critical for modern technologies to mitigating the intensifying destruction from natural hazards & tangible, multi-faceted applications of computational and data sciences. To help prepare a sustainable and diverse future geoscience workforce, we propose a two-pronged approach that targets students at two different critical junctures in the geoscience talent pipeline: high-school students deciding on colleges and majors, and graduate students working towards academic and non-academic careers in geoscience. To solidify the attitudes and identities of graduate students as effective future and lifelong geoscience leaders, we propose to train them in soft skills in general and specifically in the critical skill of mentoring. Along the other prong we propose to engage high-school students from schools with large populations of underrepresented groups in a summer geoscience experience at Northwestern University during six summer weeks.