With rising college tuition and uncertainty of the return of investment in higher education, it has become increasingly important to prepare students with marketable skills for the workforce and arm them with the tools to secure employment. Online education and Professional Science Master’s programs often try to address the deficiencies graduates face when seeking employment, but these strategies aren’t always widely accepted within traditional academic programs.

With the economic malaise in the United States, colleges and universities are assessing the impact of academic programs related to their overall mission and constituency. Geoscience departments are facing pressure to demonstrate the return on investment of their educational program provides. The metrics of these inquiries are variable, but usually center on the employment of graduates; often from partial data gathered by alumni offices. Many departments do not have structured longitudinal tracking of their graduates, thus limiting the extent of their supporting information.

Collaborative and social technologies have been increasingly used to facilitate distributed data collection and observation in science.  However, “Web 2.0” and basic social media are seeing limited coordinated use in building student and early-career geoscientists knowledge and understanding of the profession and career for which they have undertaken.  The current generation of geology students and early career professionals are used to ready access to myriad of information and interaction opportunities, but they remain largely unaware about the geoscience profession, what the full scope of