IDEA Newsletter March 10, 2023

IDEA action items

Please fill out your lab group code of conduct using our template! Discuss this as a group and consider posting it on your lab websites – this is a great way to show prospective students that our labs are welcoming spaces.

Have you done any exciting outreach or DEI work recently? Please let us know by filling out this table! Examples include: interviews with media, work with K-12 students, Maryland Day exhibits, Campus DEI committees

Progress this month

  • Field trips 
    • Compiled a list of possible field trip locations
    • Selected three field trips for semester
  • Build minority / outreach / etc speaker list for Colloquium
  • Removed deadlinks from IDEA website.
  • Updated the contact page on IDEA website

Upcoming events:

Maryland Day on April 29th (Sat)

Are you presenting at Maryland Day? 

Consider adding spanish text to your exhibits! Karla has kindly offered to help with translation and asks that you send any text well in advance. Deadline: April 7th

Please send us your photographs of you in the field, in the lab, and at conferences so we can create a poster: “What does it mean to be a geologist?” Deadline: April 7th

DEI in the news: Happy International Women’s Day!

Several graduate and undergraduate student women in our department have been in the news recently! Read more about their accomplishments here:

https://eos.org/articles/a-tiny-new-device-could-help-find-extraterrestrial-life

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/19

https://www.popsci.com/science/orbitrap-laser-alien-life/

https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/major-north-american-oil-source-yields-clues-one-earths-deadliest-mass-extinctions

DEI reading discussion: Dealing with failure

  • Nature Reviews Chemistry: “The Need to Normalize Failure” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XhXEvTYMdJfGUicPoVRzLKOQlq8WWbUx/view?usp=share_link
    • Failure is an important part of the process of science  
    • Despite the ubiquity of failure, more than 70% of researchers experience imposter syndrome 
    • The authors shared CVs of failure 
    • The authors suggest that students and faculty should find opportunities to talk openly about failure and how to use failure as an opportunity for reflection, for example:
      • Regular one-on-one meetings where failure and success are discussed
      • Panels, workshops, and outreach activities 
  • IDEA meeting discussion of the paper: 
    • Examples of how to cope with failure would have been helpful; we came up with some of our own examples 
      • “Life affirmation” in which you do something fun or celebratory after a failure to remember that there is a lot more to life than our career failures 
      • Writing down your thoughts about the failure to “get it all out” and move on
      • Talk to your advisor and peers and ask them about failure that they overcame in their career