Creating Community for Early-Career Geoscientists

Abstract

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) play central roles in nurturing the next generation of geoscientists. Students and young scientists make up about one quarter of the unions’ active memberships [American Geophysical Union, 2013; European Geosciences Union, 2014], creating a major opportunity to include a new generation of geoscientists as more active contributors to the organizations’ activities, rather than merely as consumers. Both organizations are now explicitly expanding their bottom-up organizational structures to include early-career members (ECMs) by appointing student (AGU) and early-career scientist (EGU) representatives for their scientific divisions. (We refer to “early-career members” because AGU and EGU define student and postdoc members differently). Because this expansion is a recent development, it is still unclear what roles these representatives will play and how these roles will evolve over the coming years. We are ECMs in the hydrological sciences. Here we show how the Young Hydrological Society (YHS) used bottom-up initiatives, aligned closely with the newly appointed AGU and EGU representatives, to help improve the professional development of student and postdoc members by providing opportunities to increase their contributions to the geoscience unions. We call for a conversation on how ECMs can make the best use of these new opportunities to engage proactively with the unions.