HR: 1340h
AN: ED13A-1213
TI: The Southern California Earthquake Center/Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (SCEC/UseIT) Internship Program
AU: * Perry, S
EM: perry@usc.edu
AF: Southern California Earthquake Center, University of Southern California MC 0742, Los Angeles, CA 90089 United States
AU: Jordan, T
EM: tjordan@usc.edu
AF: Southern California Earthquake Center, University of Southern California MC 0742, Los Angeles, CA 90089 United States
AB: Our undergraduate research program, SCEC/UseIT, an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates site, provides software for earthquake researchers and educators, movies for outreach, and ways to strengthen the technical career pipeline. SCEC/UseIT motivates diverse undergraduates towards science and engineering careers through team-based research in the exciting field of earthquake information technology. UseIT provides the cross-training in computer science/information technology (CS/IT) and geoscience needed to make fundamental progress in earthquake system science. Our high and increasing participation of women and minority students is crucial given the nation"s precipitous enrollment declines in CS/IT undergraduate degree programs, especially among women. UseIT also casts a "wider, farther" recruitment net that targets scholars interested in creative work but not traditionally attracted to summer science internships. Since 2002, SCEC/UseIT has challenged 79 students in three dozen majors from as many schools with difficult, real-world problems that require collaborative, interdisciplinary solutions. Interns design and engineer open-source software, creating increasingly sophisticated visualization tools (see "SCEC-VDO," session IN11), which are employed by SCEC researchers, in new curricula at the University of Southern California, and by outreach specialists who make animated movies for the public and the media. SCEC-VDO would be a valuable tool for research-oriented professional development programs.
UR: http://www.scec.org/useit
DE: 0530 Data presentation and visualization
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
DE: 0855 Diversity
DE: 6349 General or miscellaneous
DE: 7200 SEISMOLOGY
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2006 Fall Meeting