Welcome back everyone we now present to you, an experiment in which we try to provide for you all the sources of support, both financial, and development, that the USGS can give you.
And this is an informational session, and I hope that you ask lots and lots of questions, and it's also a way for you to meet some of the most important people when it comes to our different programs.
And so our master of ceremonies will be Gavin Hayes.
Thanks, Sarah! Afternoon everyone. Welcome to our session on what can USGS do for you?
For those of you that don't know me. My name's Gavin Hayes I'm the Senior Science Advisor for Earthquakes and Geologic Hazards, which means that I'm the program coordinator the USGS Earthquake.
Hazards Program. Thanks to Sarah and the Workshop Committee for having us here.
As she said, an experiment, and to talk to you on four topics around this general theme of what USGS can do for you. We'll have contributions from Eleanour Snow.
The national manager of youth and education programs with the Office of Science, Quality, and Integrity of USGS.
You'll be discussing, as you can see on your screen internship programs and partnerships that support students.
After that, Steve DeLong, ESC (Earthquake Science Center) Research Geologist, will talk to us about ESC
Student Internship Program, and then I'll discuss our Mendenhall Research Program and the Earthquake Hazards Program
external grants activities, as you'll notice that we're talking to you live, it's a little different than a lot of the other sessions that you've seen so far.
So each of us will be sharing our screens and presenting whatever we want to say, and then we'll have a Q&A
session at the end of that. So please reserve your questions for that slot, because since we're live, we want't be able to address any questions that come at us in the chat while we're speaking. And with that I'll kick it straight over
to I don't know who will be presenting first. As I said, I'm internship programs. I don't know.
Thank you. Gavin. Nice to see you all.
I'm Eleanor Snow, Manager of Youth and Education Programs at USGS, and I'll start.
By giving you just a quick overview of USGS, and you may be aware that we work across all of the Earth Sciences and organize our science in five mission areas, water resources.
We have strem gauges on every stream in the country, we look at water quality and water quantity, and U.S. streams
that's our largest group of scientists, actually. Natural hazards, which is where earthquakes falls along with volcanoes and landslides and other natural hazards.
Ecosystems, not a lot of people recognize we have ecosystems in the USGS because it's not obvious in the name,
but we absorb the U.S. Biological Survey, so we have a large group of people who are looking at invasive species and pathogens in plants and animal systems.
Our climate adaptation and resilience groups are in ecosystems as well.
Our core science is geology, rocks and mapping, and all of that or geology topics that you can think of, and then energy and minerals is really about a large part of that is about commodities all of those things we need to build up.
The modern world that we live in your cell phones and your computers
we're resources those things, and how available are they,
and what is our green energy future look like. So, if it's on the land or just under it, where we're there.
When you're doing science at a federal science agency there's a lot of immediacy to that.
You can build a career. starting from right out of college all the way up to the highest level of scientists within the USGS.
We work very collaboratively across those mission areas and and across science centers.
And a federal science agency a lot of the work that we do is applied and people are looking for the data right when it is created.
And so there's an immediacy that is lacking sometimes. In an academic research environment where you do the research and write it up,
and it goes through weeks or months of review before it's published.
People are waiting for the data as soon as it comes off, sometimes for a Federal science agency.
But we also do fundamental science and technology research.
So the wide gamut of things, and adding for his Federal science career.
So what do we have for students at the undergraduate level?
We have two research programs that are on a nomination basis.
The cooperative summer internship program and the STEM educational partnerships Fellows. In both of those programs
you need to be nominated to be an intern and for those of you coming engaged in earthquake meeting, you're more likely, geoscientist. So I'm gonna guess.
So your pathway to this would be through the National Association of Geoscience
Teachers. Your field camp director can nominate you for a summer internship through that program, and we consider all nominated students to be qualified and you'll be in the application pool if you apply through any of those nomination, Pathways.
Most of the USGS internships are under the Federal Pathways Programs and Pathways is a word that is used across Federal government for student internships and recent jobs for recent graduates, and those are all advertised in U.S.A. jobs and I'll talk a very briefly about U.S.A. jobs in
just a minute. But we also do student contracts, and that's a fairly common way for a student to work on a USGS project. In those situations,
a particular project is advertised usually at your school, so through your professors you might hear about it, or through a list serve.
at your department, and you apply to work on a particular project, and you'd become an independent contractor to the Federal Government,
on a student contract. So you're not hired by USGS,
but you're working on USGS science for us, directed by USGS scientists as an independent contractor, and you can find out more about these things on
USGS.gov_ugintern will get you there.
Pathways, so all Federal jobs that are open to the public are dvertised under U.S.A.
Jobs, and they just launched literally this week an intern portal.
So intern.usajobs.gov will get you there, but because it's brand new and just launched, you might also want to just go straight to U.S.A. jobs and look there, too, because I'm not sure everything is quite collated onto the intern page yet.
I strongly encourage you if you're ever thinking about a Federal job to go to usajob.gov,
create an account, build a resume there, and set notifications.
Why build a resume? Because that's how the first person to see your application who's somebody from HR
is used to looking at, and for information. So if you upload your own formatted resume, they might not find the information they're looking for.
You're just better off using the resume builder because that's the format people are looking for.
And ignore what your Career Center says about a two-page resume, be expansive about your experiences in that. Set notifications because you want to know when jobs are advertised, they're always addicted for a period of time.
And sometimes that's a short period of time. So you want to hear about them when they happen.
Read the vacancy announcement very carefully, pay particular attention to the eligibility requirements into the required documents, and make sure you include all of those things in your application.
Be sure that your resume is explicit about how you, how you are eligible for that job.
For example, let's say that it says that you need to have some training in induced seismicity and you have a job.
You have a class that you took called the "Rise of Earthquakes in Texas and Oakland."
Well, you and I both know that's about induced seismicity.
But that HR person who looks at it doesn't know that.
So you need to say in your resume, my class called the "Rise of Earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma" is a course in induced seismicity, and therefore I meet these requirements.
It's really important that you be explicit about that because you want your resume to get past that HR person into the person who's doing the hiring and the other tip that I will give you is about time, two things about time.
If you see something in an ad that says it will be open for a week, or until the first 100 applications are received, assume that first 100 will be in the first day, and and get on it right away; and the second thing is, if it says you need a year's experience be sure that your
resume indicates 365 days.
If you say I did this from January to December, HR
is going to say we don't know when in January we don't know when in December we'll give you credit for half of each month.
so that's 11 months. You're not qualified.
Be sure that you are explicit, that you meet the time requirements. Again, because you want that resume to get past that
HR person and onto that desk. I'm happy to give you any other tips if you're working with the Federal resume, feel free to reach out and ask.
For graduate students, USGS works with the National Science Foundation, and this is
21013 is the program announcement number for NSF
intern, very easy to remember, because they call it intern. The intern program is a supplemental grants program up to $55,000 for 6 months to go spend time somewhere else, and we hope you come to USGS,
but you can actually go just about anywhere with that money.
It has to be tied to an existing NSF
Grant, so you'll be working with the person you want to work with at NSF
to outline a project, and your advisor, who has a current NSF
grant, you can apply this money to. But the great thing about this intern program is that it's NSF-wide funding pool.
So the person who runs the, the program manager at NSF
in earthquake studies, has a pot of money that they give out to researchers for grants.
This $55,000 doesn't come from that pot of money, they're not spending their own money to say yes to you, and so they say yes to most people. It's a very, very high funding rate on these supplemental grants.
And we love having grad students spending time at USGS.
So really encourage you to take advantage of that.
Couple of other things I just want you to be aware of,
they're not USGS programs, but we engage with them, the Virtual Student Federal Service is a State Department program that is open to all Federal agencies. Agencies advertise a job,
and you volunteer to work on that from school, during the year, or yeah, or from home.
10 to 15 h a week, there's thousands of projects.
They're very fun and cool, and apply in July is the catch phrase for the Virtual Student Federal Service.
So, think about looking next July. This year USGS has a 107 VSFS Interns across USGS working on a variety of things.
And we have university partnerships, and some of you probably are aware of this because you might be on a campus like Caltech or Colorado School of Mines that has a USGS office on or adjacent to campus.
So we do a lot of work in collaboration with the campuses that we sit on.
In addition, if you or your friends are interested in other kinds of fields besides earthquakes, we have climate adaptation science centers that are university consortia centered on U.S.
college campuses, and that engage USGS
scientists as faculty members, studying climate adaptation. The cooperative research units, again, are USGS
scientists who are faculty members at 40 to 43 different universities.
and Fish and Wildlife and the Water Resources Research Institutes are the same. USGS scientists who are faculty members studying Water on about 47 different campuses around the country.
So, if climate or efficient wildlife or Water are your interests, there are USGS scientists who are faculty members who can engage you with those things, and that's a very quick overview.
I'm gonna pause. So there's time for you to hear from others, and then questions at the end.
That's wonderful. Thanks, Eleanor. Next up will be Steve Delong, discussing
ESC (Earthquake Science Center) student internships.
Hi there! Holler, if you have any problems, seeing or hearing. I'm gonna describe the Pathways.
Internship Program that exists within the Earthquake Science Center and in this slide
you'll see some of the folks who do the behind the scenes work to make this happen.
And I shall also acknowledge, Eleanor Snow, our previous speaker, who provided us with us a lot of wisdom and guidance, as we conceived of this program, and really helped us get off the ground and make it a success.
So [noise]
That's gonna take me just a second to. Did you guys hear the sound?
Yeah, we we could hear it, Steve.
Rats.
You might want to do it for all slides simultaneously.
Yeah, I wonder how I do that. Or I'll just do it
not in presenter mode.
John, do you have a quick suggestion for how to...
Yeah, I would just go through it just like you are right now.
It looks fine, just everybody that's looking ignore the slight left side of your screen.
Alright sorry about that. This is a rehash of an old presentation that had to have a soundtrack.
So we're just gonna go like this. Okay. So in 2020,
the Earthquake Science Center created a program to hire students really from colleges, universities near USGS offices, especially the institutions that may not have as much access to such opportunities as the larger research institutions, and so our efforts have included recruitment hiring our students from 2-year and
4-year colleges and universities and graduate schools. And to be clear these are Federal jobs,
they're paid and benefits eligible. In 2021, our first summer, which was sort of the height of the pandemic or when everyone was stuck at home,
we hired 21 students. I hired 14 in 2022.
Some of these students still work with the USGS and we're going to continue this program for next summer.
So, as Eleanor mentioned there are other mechanisms to work for USGS
as a student. These include the NAGT
Program, Student Service Contracts, the NSF programs that Eleanor detailed.
And this program is run by USGS staff in the Earthquake
Science Center as a grassroots activity. So this is voluntary duty to to put this program together and make it happen with that great support from the USGS
HR Staff and the Earthquake Science Center leadership.
And of course, the secret to the success of the program are the mentors that are willing to take the time to work with students and of course, the students who come to our Center and do such a great job with their research projects.
So the Pathways Program what we're doing this year
we've solicited employees to in the Center to mentor intern projects.
And this is really not just research. I said, research in my previous sentence is not just a research internship.
This is really supporting all activities within the Center. The science center leadership has provided funding to support this program.
Little bit of jargon here from the Center level, but then, for students to stay on longer, often individual projects or scientists will have funding to do that.
We recruit from institutions with diverse student populations near USGS offices, and not just from geology and geophysics
departments. Interns will be in the USGS
offices in Menlo, Moffett Field, Seattle, and Pasadena, and as part of this we provide cohort building activities, mentor support, intern support from the Center and career development
during the summer months. And interns are eligible for continuation as Pathways Interns into the school year and conversion to term and permanent employees within the USGS
without advertising the position.
So this retention of students can help us
address staffing challenges, and we've hired a total towards 35 students so far, mostly remote.
In 2021, partial mode in 2022, and so, as I mentioned, some continued so as of a couple of months ago, 7 students from the initial summer still work for the USGS.
Two are now on permanent positions, and one is on a four-year term position from last summer as of a couple of months ago; 9 students still work for USGS. And so it's not our primary goal of the program which is simply to provide early careers
exposure, earthquake science for a diverse group of students,
but it is nice that we can find students and keep them within our staff as it gets more and more challenging
to hire in the Federal system. So I'm just gonna run through a few examples of some of the experiences that interns have had. So in our hi-res geophysical survey group, Ahkayla Gomez and Delton Samuel are two interns, both
have given presentations at the 2022 SSA
Meeting. Delton also presented at the National Association of Black Geoscientists meeting. Ahkayla presented at SACNAS meeting and both of these interns have USGS data releases and Open-File Report authorships.
Delton is now a PhD student at LSU and
Ahkayala is continuing towards a BS
at Cal State East Bay and really both of these interns we got to know and they assisted with a wide-range of field projects at the USGS.
Another example, geophysical site response, [indiscernible] Jose Game, Christina
Kitamikado and Tara Nye were all interns.
They're all co-authors on a date release. And then there's a large number of presentations that these students have given at SSA
and SCEC meetings in 2021 and 2022 on site response, and related topics.
And you can see them having a nice time at SCEC there in the photo.
Gabe Paris came from Portland State they worked on operational earthquake forecasting and they developed software to analyze and visualize earthquake aftershocks.
I believe Andy Michael use some of these tools in his talk on the Ferndale earthquakes,
maybe a couple of days ago. Gabe is now a software developer at the Alaska Earthquake Science Center and has published their work in SRL.
As you can see in the upper right there
Up in the Pacific Northwest the Earthquake Geology group, Garrett Huddleston, was an intern last summer, and use internship to plan a paleoseismic study, and that trench is now sort of the focus of his MS thesis work
at Central Washington University, and you see some photos of them excavating into the Dead
Coyote fault near Ellensburg, Washington here.
And then finally Javier Garcia was a student from Puerto Rico, who worked on InSAR interferometry and presented results at the 2022 AGU meeting in Chicago on using SAR interferograms in earthquake swarms
and in partitioning the aseismic and seismic
moment release. So these are some of the shiny examples of successes.
But there's many more examples of successes. Students really worked across research and earthquake monitoring.
They develop skills and instrumentation GIS computer coding research dissemination of research results, public speaking,
and of course, got to know the joys and challenges of working for a Federal Government agencies.
An interest come to us with a really wide range of experience, and our matched with tasks and projects that lead the career development really broad sense.
It's not a research focused internship necessarily, some interns are more focused on technical tasks that support research and network operations rather than leading their own research projects.
So really motivated to find students for a wide range of departments beyond just Earth science.
So in the summer we had weekly intern meetings, thanks to Annmarie Baltay, who really took the lead on these held as hybrid events for folks in Menlo/Moffett Field
and beyond. You know, introductions, people learned about the Earthquake Science Center and the USGS,
just more broadly, met a lot of the staff, and learn about projects in the Science Center, and then each of that interns were given the opportunity to give talks about some of the work that they got involved in. Last summer all the interns converged on Menlo/Moffett for a couple of days or actually for
a week, really, with a couple of days of sort of program time.
But other times just to meet folks and work. And we did a field trip,
you can see in the left there we start on the Hayward Fault, looked at creeping faults, and then traversed over looked at instrumentation at the USGS sites in the foothills and then went up into the mountains, where the San Andreas fault is in the Santa
Cruz mountains, and just saw a wide range of USGS activities on that field trip.
And this also included interns that came in from other programs and whatnot
so isn't just the Pathways group.
And then another day with spent touring USGS facilities looking at the rock lab, the Rock Physics lab, where they create an earthquake and looking at the network operations where they're able to see the seismometer measurement of the students walking around the seismometer that they had made the
previous day.
So the program feedback has been overwhelming positive.
We collect feedback from interns, mentors, supervisors.
Obviously some challenges of hired and onboarding within the Federal bureaucracy some issues with communication organization.
You know, scientists grassroots-run program and we use these to shape and improve the program.
If there some metrics on how this affects workforce diversity, for me
the question is, can USGS look more like the communities that we serve?
And some anecdotes, there's a little bit of data, we've hired five veterans through this program. Of the interns that we hired,
40% are people of color. This compares to 25% in the Earthquake Science Center as a whole, 22% in the USGS-wide Pathways Intern Program and the goal of 32.5% within the USGS. This is a result of targeted
recruiting of students from institutions with a diverse student populations.
We are motivated and recruit qualified students from a wide range of institutions, and we want to benefit the students and
the USGS and develop stronger relationships between the USGS and academic institutions near our offices.
And this program can really be used to fill vacancies for workforce and succession planning.
And if you'd like to learn more, if you're interested in being a participant in this program or learning more about how we recruit, feel free to reach out to me or email the email on your screen there. And that's what I have thanks for listening.
Wonderful. Thank you, Steve, and now I will share my screen.
Hopefully, you can see that?
Yes.
Thanks again everyone. As a reminder, I'm going be talking about USGS Mendenhall Research Fellowship Programs and Earthquake Hazards Program, and
External grants activities. Unfortunately, Jill Frank, External Research Coordinator couldn't be with us today.\,
So I'll be showing some things for her.
Hopefully, I'll be brief, so we can still have some good time for Q&A.
First off I'll start with the Mendenhall Program.
Previously, this was called the Mendenhall Post-doctoral Research Fellowship Program.
It provides research opportunities to recent PhD graduates to come and work with USGS scientist on priority topics for USGS.
It is a USGS-wide program. I think it's most heavily leveraged within the Natural Hazards ,
Mission Area that includes the Earthquake Hazards Program and our other geologic houses disciplines, including volcano, landslide, coastal and marine, and geomagnetism.
These programs particularly use the Mendenhall Fellowships
in addition to the opportunities that they provide, both to our scientists and to the Mendenhall Fellows that come in. It's a been a fantastic recruitment mechanism into our research
grant positions, while, as I said, at the same time facilitating that cutting-edge research and a more nimble manner than where otherwise able to achieve through permanent [indiscernible].
Okay. Mendenhall projects come with 2 years of guaranteed funding.
They are extendable for another 2 years, depending on funding availability.
As I said, they've been an extremely successful recruitment strategy for permanent positions across our earthquake-related science centers.
Many of our our current permanent scientists were once Mendenhall Fellows.
There are currently 9 EHP (Earthquake Hazards Program) related Mendenhalls across the Earthquake Science Center and 5 of the Geologic Hazards Science Center in Golden, Colorado.
There are another 7 Mendenhall's in Golden within the Landslide Hazards and Geomagnetism programs. I'll note here that Center's also hire fixed-term postdoc-like positions that don't have the Mendenhall title but are otherwise fairly equivalent.
These come up when there are surges in funding or specific needs within our program to regions that the Center's meet.
For example, recent positions associated with the upcoming 50 State National Seismic Hazard Model needs or funding Center's might receive, like PG&E
for ESC.
As part of our Round 19 Mendenhall program
about 2 years ago 4 Mendenhall projects were funded across HP.
With full or partial Natural Hazards Mission Area or earthquake program support.
That was, I think, 2 at each Science Center, and both science centers were able to support a further Mendenhall on top of those with their own Center funding. In Round 20, which close about a year ago there was a a large number of earthquake related research
opportunities, but just 6 of the 13 advertised opportunities received qualified applicants. Out of those six, 4 new Mendenhall's came onboard, and so, after that Round 20 process, we were really quite concerned that we hadn't received as many applications as we have in the
past and we undertook a review and internal review to improve the program for the future.
That has led to a revised timeline for opportunity development, advertisement, submission, and review, with the goal of being able to issue earlier offers to be more competitive with other Federal intention programs. Decrease the work burden on our internal scientists that act as research
advisors, and particularly around that busy end-of-year period.
So that resulted in Round 21, all the opportunities that are shown here, and this just closed in November of 2022.
We have 15 research opportunities across the Earthquake Hazards Program of the 28 that were advertised across our hazards programs.
We received 24 applicants for those 15 opportunities just two of the opportunities did not receive applicants, and for the first time this year, as I'm highlighting there at the bottom of the slide, in an effort that was spearheaded by Andy Michael at
ESC . We advertised a general opportunity that was intended to attract those applicants that don't fit neatly into any one of the other advertised positions.
So instead here applicants are able to construct their own proposal in coordination with earthquake scientists.
As long as the subject is well aligned with program priorities, that particular opportunity received
the largest number of applicants across all of the opportunities in our has its missionary so I think was quite successful.
The review process for all these applications is ongoing.
We hope to begin offers later this month or an early march, and we're excited that we have increase the number of applicants.
Again, although I think we still need to do some work to ensure that we get more applicants per research opportunity.
So kind of some summarize Mendenhalls.
Most Mendenhall opportunities are now advertised in August for submission by early November.
That offers in February to March, as I said, and start dates over the duration of the year that offers are made. Off cycle
opportunities are also advertised throughout the year. So this is when projects have their own secured source of funding to support such positions and don't need to compete in that kind of general pool
that's the fixed annual timeline.
And finally, one of the most important points that I wanted to impress is that potential applicants are really encouraged to work with USGS
researchers, as they develop their proposals. [oops went the wrong way] Historically the proposals that have been most successful are those that have been developed in consultation with USGS
scientists and that are well aligned with either program or Natural Hazards
Missionary priorities. Okay, so moving on from Mendenhall's, I wanted to also briefly highlight another recruitment opportunity in the Earthquake Program.
Steve DeLong nicely presented some information on the ESC Internship Program, which has been a great way to improve recruitment in our West Coast offices. For anyone interested in activities at our other science center, the Geologic Hazards Science Center in Golden,
Colorado. Their intention program is now open for applications to work on a variety of interesting projects
this summer. As it says here, to see typically highs around 30 students each year
in projects ranging from a seismic hazard engineering and risk, seismic source and ground motion characterization, earthquake monitoring, software development is a good chunk of what GHS does and then, as I've mentioned, previously as well, that landslide and
Geomagnetic Hazard Programs. You can feel free to contact me about this or I've listed the GHSC deputy director, Brian Shiro, for more details. All recruitment opportunities for EHP
and USGS more broadly, or most, I should say, as Eleanor mentioned, are advertised and
accept applications through the USA jobs portal. So, as Eleanor did, I will encourage anyone interested in working with USGS
to establish an account there to get that profile setup and to look out for opportunities and sign up for notifications.
Okay. Now on to the EHP Grants Program.
This is sometimes called the NEHRP Grants Program because authority to operate
this comes from the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. Congressional authorization that establishes our four agency partnership with FEMA, NYST and NSF.
This is a snapshot of our Grant's website.
And, as you can see here, it provides our grants are intended to provide support for external research
that assists EHP in achieving our programmatic goals to mitigate earthquake losses.
I mentioned to you Jill Frank before, she's our associate coordinator for external research and leads our Grants Program and assisted by [indiscernible]
Skinner. Jill's contact details are shown there on the grant's web page, and she's our first point of contact for questions about grant and related activities.
But you can, of course, ask me here today as well.
Our Grant's Program is the largest in the USGS, we allocate typically 4 to 5 million dollars a year for grants across all of our our different panels.
Funding opportunities are distributed across 10 panels as listed here, 5 are regional northern California, southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, Inter-Mountain West, and the Central/Eastern U.S.,
and 5 are topical, Earthquake Early Warning, earthquake rupture forecasting, earthquake source processes, ground motion research and hazards impact in risk.
Note that this year for the upcoming cycle for those topical [indiscernible] on new after a recent reshuffle that saw earthquake rupture forecasting in earthquake source processes replaced earthquake physics. Hazard impacts in risk replaced engineering seismology and impacts in
ground motion research replaced our national panel. Every year,
We released a a document of research priorities for the upcoming Grant cycle
that comes out in mid-march, when the Grant's period opens, and that period closes again towards the end of May.
But at any time on our website, as shown there, you can see the priorities from the previous year.
So that is a good resource. If you ever wanna see what our priorities are when it's not that open Grant's period. And finally, I'm showing here some details of our proposal submission and funding statistics over the past few cycles of no and little concern
to us, is a bit of declining trends since 2020, when we received the largest number of proposals ever close to 250 to 2021, when we received a lot less and 2022 when we received fewer again so we've speculated that this
trend is driven, somewhat by the pandemic and simultaneous rise in the number of no cost extensions
we've been asked for, but would, of course, appreciate any feedback you will have on the drivers for that decline as well.
Our funding has stayed pretty consistent. We funded 57 proposals in the FY21 cycle 2 years ago, 60 proposals in
2022 and 31 so far in FY23
that we've yet to make our final funding decisions
having just received our annual budget a month ago, so that process will be finalized soon and hopefully
final notifications will go out in mid- to late-February, maybe early March.
Of note to this particular group is that last point in our last cycle we've received only 6 proposals within the northern California panel.
So we're very hopeful that through this engagement we can improve that over the next cycle, and that's all I have for you today.
So hopefully, leaving now time for Q&A I'll leave you with a slide of useful resources and information, and look forward to hearing from you in
our discussion section. So I think we have about 15 min left, and please raise your virtual hand, to ask either me or Eleanor, or Steve any questions.
Thanks. Everyone.
So who has a question? Don, go ahead.
Hi, Gavin! Those are all wonderful presentations. A question for Eleanor and I have to apologize because Steve may have addressed this, but I had a phone call.
So I missed the bulk of his presentation, but our statistics kept on.
how many undergrad and grad interns end up actually working for the USGS as employees after their graduation?
So they're incomplete. And that's one thing we're really working on this year is trying to get a better handle on that.
Actually our director, a former USGS intern through our program and is currently the director.
We have about that I know about 40 or 50, but I don't know if that's a complete list. Thank you.
Oh, including me, by the way, I was an intern at USGS
in the Earthquake Science Center, working on the Parkfield project long time ago.
I was also an intern in the USGS and Mendenhall postdoc.
Other questions, for the group.
I'm seeing some in the chat that I'm not doing a very good job of keeping track of.
Andy asked the question for the next external funding cycle.
When is funding expected to start? Thank you
Andy. That's a great question, so the submissions will be from March to May.
Those proposals will be reviewed in summer panels in the kind of June to August timeframe, and that funding would then start with the new fiscal year anytime from October 2023, though the grants, period is typically they
start the beginning 2024
And it's great to see that there are so many interns on the call.
When will applications be accepted for ESC 2023 internships?
Steve.
Very soon, so let us know if you're interested.
Send us a note, and we'll send you the info.
Other questions from the group.
So Julian just posted a question of getting that elusive long-term job at the USGS.
So the Pathways Internship is one of the few mechanisms in which you can actually be converted from an intern,
A student intern into a term or a permanent position.
So it's really, it's a, I think, unique in the Federal service in that way.
So both for those of you who are in the USGS
and are thinking about staffing it's a great mechanism for that.
And if you're not in the USGS, but what would like to be
it's a right mechanism. The post-doc question is a little bit stickier answer.
There's no formal mechanism to change from a postdoc, Mendenhall postdoc
to a permanent employee.
But you know many of us could raise our hands as permanent employees who used to be Mendenhall postdocs, and often you get a lot of specific experiences which makes you a stronger applicant for a permanent position.
And Steve. Was that an answer to Julian's question about whether there's an advantage to being an intern?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. And so some of it is just about, you know, it's like anything in the world.
It's about networking and getting to know people.
So the best way to get a job at the USGS is to get to get to know the USGS,
and that can lead to good things
Steve, we have a question from Anna Maria about opportunities for students based in a university outside of the US
and a non-US citizen. We we get that question all the time Anna Maria.
It's very difficult, I will say, to hire into Federal positions, non-US citizens, though you might note from my accent that I was originally a non-US citizen when I started with USGS.
So it's not impossible, but it's rare, certainly, within direct hires, and there are contracting opportunities that make things a little more easier.
But it's difficult.
Sarah, you have your hand up.
So, as you're here filling in for Jill Frank's on the funding side,
it seems like every year on the funding side, we get a lot of questions related to like how much can you propose, or does it matter whether you propose for 1 year or 2 years?
Is there anything you can offer guidance on that?
Sure, Sarah, thanks. I think there's generally a perception that we only award small grants, and that larger grants are not favored.
I suppose that's not entirely untrue, because we do have a limited amount of funding, but I think if a larger proposal is well justified, then we can certainly award it. Typically grants are in the range of somewhere between about $60k and a
$100k for a one year proposal, but, as I said, we can go beyond that, and we can provide 2 years of funding up to 2 years of funding but often that is a discussion point for panels as well, the priorities of whether a second year of funding is needed versus
priorities of funding some of the other grants in the proposal pool.
So we will be including updated guidance in our priorities announcements
when that comes out in March of this year, related to those questions.
And Kevin, Rachel asked if there's opportunities similar to internships for recent graduates, apart from just regular posted jobs. Not that I know of.
Not similar kinds of things. Many of our interns are recent graduates.
They apply while they're still a student, and by the time they start the job they have graduated. Within
USA jobs there is a Pathway for recent graduates within 2 years of graduation.
You can apply for a recent graduate jobs and those are also convertible to full-time permanent employee employment.
So there's a good opportunity for recent graduates.
If you've already graduated.
Let me just tag on to that. Our internship program in the ESC
you're only eligible to apply if you are a student, and once you graduate, you're no longer eligible, though, you can be converted.
There are other Pathways positions that are called Recent Graduate Pathways opportunities, we haven't tended to use those in our Science Center, but they do exist at the Survey.
And then there are these things that we've alluded to call Student Services Contracts, and those students up to 2 years post-graduation are eligible for Student Service Contracts.
So the best thing to do is to make contact with a person at the USGS
you'd like to work with and and learn what sort of opportunity they might be able to present to you.
And I...
And Elizabeth Cochran made a nice point that there are many people who work with USGS who did not have a postdoc or an internship. I've hired many people who have never worked with USGS before.
It is by no means a prerequisite to getting a job at the USGS.
Yeah, thanks for stressing that, Steve. I'd also like to highlight one of the things that Steve mentioned during his talks that student internships can be extended beyond that summer period that we initially hired them for that has happened at ESC, it was a mechanism that
I use to keep students on when I was in my previous life as a research scientist at GHSC, I had students that that stayed on for years beyond, when they were initially hired as long as they were still enrolled as a student.
So it was a great opportunity. Andy, you have your hand up.
I wanted to highlight something that Mike put in the chat.
I seconded, which is, that in the Mendenhall opportunities it's often really valuable
if while you're a grad student or you have a grad student, you think would fit well here, start talking to potential USGS advisors.
You know, 2 years out, 3 years out. I was fortunate to get to know Jean Hardebeck while she was still early in her graduate career.
I was fortunate to get to know Andrea Llenos and also Max Schneider, who you heard from today.
All of these are people we knew, you know, as they were going through grad school.
And then we were like about to get out. We're gonna put in a research opportunity and see if we can make this work.
So that's really valuable. But it is also one of the reasons we put in this candidate-
driven proposals this year, cause we know that's really an unfair system in many ways. It depends on, you know, prior knowledge and so we're really trying with the candidate-driven proposals to be open to you know people
we haven't gotten to know and I think that's one thing we really want to try to keep.
You know what we're gonna keep working at hopefully next year.
But, if you do know, you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out early on to those targeted opportunities are still going to be very important.
And I knew some of my advisors way before the Mendenhall proposal, but I was also postdoc.
So, and then I was, you know I was hanging out around the Survey before that opportunity.
Thanks.
Just a tiny note. The one thing hasn't been mentioned is there's a robust volunteer part of the USGS.
So if you're a student near USGS you have some time,
you have some interest, reach out, and there may be volunteer opportunities often the Geophysical Survey Group just needs people to do work.
And so that's it's always useful to just reach out
Okay, we have about 6 minute left in the session.
If others have questions for us. Yeah, as Sarah points out, please don't be shy. I'll build on what, Andy just said, and note that one can apply to multiple Mendenhall cycles.
So you can apply both early, well before you intend to graduate,
if you're within a year of your intended graduation date, and then subsequently as well. We have in the past had applicants apply to multiple Mendenhall cycles, and sometimes it takes more than one before one gets in.
I'll take it from everyone's signs that everyone's busy writing down the details of their external grants activities as well, and we'll submit a proposal to our upcoming grant's cycle.
So I'm looking forward to seeing all of those.
So I'll just shime in. After the comment about Mendenhall, and and don't be shy. For the graduate research opportunities and for the Mendenhall
it really pays to have some conversations with USGS scientists you want to work with as you develop those ideas of the research that you want to do. So,
don't hesitate to reach out
talk to people when you see Mendenhall opportunity posted reach out to the scientist that's listed there and have a conversation about the work, and if you want to come to USGS for 6 months during your graduate training find a scientist, you want to work with and reach out to them and
say, hey, can we do something together, here's what I'm thinking
because that very helpful in being successful in those proposals.
We have a question from Dave Jackson. Have any of the self-intended projects by applicants growing into bigger USGS projects. Andy just answered it.
Yeah, this is the first year that we've tried that.
But certainly we hope that can be an opportunity.
Last chance for questions, otherwise I'll kick it back to Sarah.
Okay, bye to you, Sarah. Thanks everyone.