What we wish we had learned in Graduate School - a data management training roadmap for graduate students

Data management training for graduate students is a very important but often undervalued area of graduate school education. Many graduate students will go on and become professionals who are using, producing, and/or managing data that have tremendous benefits for both the research community and society. However, our personal experiences as graduate students show that data lifecycle and data management training are not part of the core curriculum in graduate school. As Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Community Fellows, we understand that data management is a critical skill in earth science and we all wished we had an opportunity to integrate it from the beginning in our graduate school experience. To the issue of lack of formal data management training in graduate education, we convened a working session during the 2020 ESIP Summer Meeting called “What we wish we had learned in Graduate School?” The session was initially planned as a working session for early career professionals to share resources and lessons learned during our own graduate school experiences. The session has sparked broad interests from the Earth science data community and attracted participants across different career stages and with different levels of expertise. The outcome of the session has been summarized as a roadmap that follows the DataONE Data Lifecycle. This roadmap projects the data lifecycle into the traditional graduate school timeline and highlights the benefits and resources of data management training for each component in the data lifecycle. This roadmap for graduate data management training will be distributed via ESIP and be continued as part of the ESIP Community Program in the future to promote data management training for graduate students in Earth sciences and beyond.