Unusual Metrics: Documenting our Workload

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. — Albert Einstein

We have been fortunate to have been running a Summer Institute for undergraduates from CSU Channel Islands and our regional Community Colleges since 2009.  Every June we pull in students from these campuses and embed them in intense academic research in a variety of disciplines.  Most recently Project ACCESO, a program funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, has been the funder of this summer work.  Our ESRM faculty have worked collaboratively to study beaches over the past three years.  This year, we adapted some of our planned work to document and assess the oiling of many of our beaches.  These 13 students were awesome and really stepped up to the plate.

When we talk about scientific work we frequently talk about the numbers of papers published in academic journals or the amount of grant money we are able to bring into our respective institutions.  This is usually a “we rock, you suck” type endeavor with the good ol’ boys or good old ways of doing things begetting more good ol’ boys or the same old same old. But there are many, many more important metrics that are often hard to quantify.  These are often intangibles or things for which we do not have a well-developed framework for assessing (although we could if we got serious about this).  The ultimate goal for those of us working on training people to better conserve our natural resources centers around an amalgamation of:

1. better understanding our planet’s interrelated systems
2. translating that understanding into working knowledge within our students
3. deepening the practical skill sets of the budding researchers (in this case, our undergraduates) who are/will be doing the work
4. materially improving our planet’s condition
5. (we might list a fourth essential component of getting gainful employment which utilizes all this skill and knowledge but that can take time to get)

We have just compiled a small set of such metrics for our Summer Institute work (for the three weeks it ran in June).  They are fun to look over (if you are into these kinds of things).