Environmental Studies Student Outcomes
°®¶¹´«Ã½â€™s Environmental Studies Program seeks to prepare each student for life as a citizen and as a leader, who is equipped to understand and address the complex environmental challenges facing our communities, nations, and planet. Graduates of our program (with either a BA in Environmental Studies or a BS in Environmental Science) will be able to tackle environmental and societal concerns in four critical areas.
- Critical thinking skills for understanding and confronting problems that involve the intersection between the natural and human worlds at multiple scales
- Fundamental knowledge about the three E’s of sustainability: environment, economics, and equity
- Methodological training for generating and analyzing data needed to investigate, explain, and mitigate environmental issues and problems
- Communication abilities to share information with technical and non-technical audiences
Our majors graduate from the program with demonstrable skills in the following core areas through an integrated curriculum that includes:
- Development of critical thinking skills that contribute to students' roles, responsibilities, and identities as citizens, leaders, and environmental actors;
- A key understanding of the multiple working systems within and between the natural and human worlds;
- The ability to explore environmental issues from a problem-oriented, interdisciplinary perspective in order to create informed opinions on both a personal and a societal level;
- An understanding of the physical and ecological interrelationships that underpin the environmental issues facing society today and in the future;
- The appreciation and integration of environmental issues within an ethical, cross-cultural, historical, and equitable context;
- A mastery of concepts pertaining to the design and evaluation of environmental policies and institutions across local, regional, national, and global scales;
- Training and practice (in classrooms, in laboratories, and in the field) of the methods required to collect and analyze the quantitative and qualitative data needed to understand and solve environmental challenges;
- Engagement of sustainability concepts, issues, and methods in the community for the betterment of campus and surrounding regional natural and human environments;
- Aptitude in written and oral communication needed to present complex information to technical and non-technical audiences (e.g. via academic and general publications, professional and academic conferences, workshops, fact sheets, etc.); and
- Training needed to support career success.