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Key Objective: 10.1 Undergraduate Sustainability Minor

The 2015 iCAP, chapter 10, objective 1 is, "Offer an undergraduate minor in sustainability, starting with about 20 students in FY16, that will provide in-depth learning about the three dimensions of sustainability and enable students to make connections between the different disciplines to solve problems related to sustainability."

Associated Metric

No metric specified for this objective

Explanation

The School of Earth, Society, and Environment (SESE) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has offered an undergraduate minor across disciplines, through the Environmental Fellows Program.  Six campus departments are proposing to revise the Environmental Fellows Program into the Sustainability, Energy, and Environment Fellows Program (SEE FP), and to transfer the program from SESE to the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment. 

According to the draft proposal, the SEE FP will be a campus-wide undergraduate minor to promote systems-level thinking about energy and sustainability and foster the development of an integrated view of the economy, society and the environment. It will provide selected students an opportunity to develop an integrated perspective on sustainable energy use and understand the feedbacks, trade-offs and barriers to achieving it and their implications for decision making. The coursework will enable students to make the connections between economics, business, environmental sciences, and technology and apply their learning to operationalize the concept of sustainability in their professional careers and day-to-day lives. The SEE FP will prepare students for pursuing careers in the corporate sector, non-profit organizations, government agencies and environmental advocacy groups.

Each SEE Fellow will take an individual program of study to satisfy the minor.  A range of coursework options – spanning the humanities, natural and social sciences – can be taken to satisfy the introductory and advanced coursework requirements.  The minor proposes to offer two new courses: a “Tools for Sustainability” course and an advanced capstone class.