Snowmass Early Career: The Key Initiatives Organization

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and organization of the Snowmass Early Career Key Initiatives, a new structure for engaging early career members in high-energy physics planning, highlighting lessons learned and organizational insights.

Contribution

It presents a novel organizational framework for early career engagement in Snowmass, including its structure, process, and reflections on implementation challenges.

Findings

Established a cross-frontier and liaison committees structure

Reflected on organizational successes and pitfalls

Provided guidance for future early career efforts

Abstract

In April 2020, the 2019 and 2020 American Physical Society's Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF) Early Career Executive Committee (ECEC) members were tasked with organizing the formation of a representative body for High-Energy Physics (HEP) early career members for the Snowmass process by the DPF Executive Committee. Here, we outline the structure we developed and the process we followed to help provide context and guidance for future early career Snowmass efforts. Our organization was composed of a cross-frontier branch with committees on Inreach, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, Survey, and Long Term Organizational Planning; in addition to the Frontier Coordination branch, formed by committees responsible for liaising with each Frontier. Throughout this document, the authors reflect on the triumphs and pitfalls of a program created from nothing over a very short period of time, by people with good intentions, who had no prior experience in building such an organization. Through this exercise of reflecting, we sometimes find that we would recommend a different path to our future selves. Insomuch as there are things to find fault with, it is in the robustness of the systems we built and refined.