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Box 3. PASSCAL Education and Outreach
PASSCAL-supported projects often incorporate graduate
students (and sometimes undergraduates) in preparation,
deployment, data collection, and science analysis,
publication, and thesis efforts. For example, during 2007,
new or ongoing student-associated projects included
efforts in Antarctica, many sites in the western United
States, Montserrat, Argentina, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Additionally, PASSCAL annually supports numerous
equipment requests for purely educational efforts. The
majority of these requests are for short-term use of the
cabled multichannel systems for university classes and
educational field programs (e.g., the Summer of Applied
Geophysical Experience [SAGE] program) supported by the
US Department of Energy and NSF.
Since 2006, in association with IRIS E&O, the PIC
and NMT host an annual orientation week for the IRIS
Intern Program (an NSF-funded Research Experience for
Undergraduates [REU] initiative). During the orientation,
IRIS interns (typically 10) from a broad range of backgrounds
participate in field trips and lectures lead by IRIS
E&O staff, and by NMT and other IRIS community faculty.
The agenda includes seismology “state-of-the-science”
talks, elements of instrumentation and data analysis,
geological and geophysical field trips, PASSCAL instrumentation
data acquisition exercises, and a career discussion
panel of professionals from government, academia, and
industry. The orientation is designed to provide a common
introduction to the field prior to the students’ departure for
their summer intern research at widely scattered IRIS institutions
and field sites. Since 1999, PASSCAL has also supported
a Summer Graduate Intern at the Instrument Center.
PASSCAL Graduate Interns acquire a detailed knowledge
of many aspects of seismographic instrumentation and data
collection by working with PIC staff for up to 12 weeks in
a wide variety of efforts, both at the PIC and in the field.
To participate in outreach at the local level, IRIS supports
an annual science award to a deserving student at Socorro
High School.
PIC staff and NMT faculty frequently gives tours and overview
talks for diverse groups, including NMT graduate and
undergraduate classes, groups on earth science field trips to
the region, visiting administrators, lawmakers, and foreign
colleagues (e.g., a 2007 delegation of Chinese colleagues
on a planning trip for establishing a PASSCAL-like facility
in China). The PIC is also used several times per year for
IRIS and partner science groups for science, review, and
facility meetings.
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