103-6 TAPPING THE VAST POOL OF TALENT THAT IS AMERICA’S COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM

Session: Balancing Tradition and Innovation: Evolving Geoscience Curricula for a Changing World (Posters)

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Even under ideal political and economic scenarios, academic institutions produce far more advanced degrees than they can hire, leading to an oversaturation the academic job market. Additionally, many students, for a variety of reasons, choose not to study at research-focused universities, choosing instead to attend four-year schools or community colleges. Teaching-focused institutions such as these thus find themselves employing trained researchers and educating interested students that together represent a large pool of largely untapped scientific talent that could produce valuable science, given sufficient resources and encouragement.

I here present the Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) Journal of Emerging Scholarship, a journal published in-house by the titular Maryland community college, now in its second year of publication. Peer review is carried out by faculty of the college, and articles are written by students on a diverse range of topics from science to the humanities. Students who publish not only get experience in research and publishing, but can also cite their achievements when developing their future careers, inside or outside of academia. Within the sciences, the research conducted by these undergraduate scientists is done locally and with usually minimal funding, but is nonetheless useful in describing local biodiversity and geology, monitoring environmental changes, and other valuable work that rarely sees publication in high impact factor journals.

By publicizing the existence of the AACC Journal of Emerging Scholarship, I hope to inspire faculty and staff at other teaching-focused academic institutions to create similar publications at their campuses, thereby making undergraduate scientific research more accessible in the future, especially in this time of uncertain federal funding and other support for the sciences.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

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