The purpose of the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Fellows Program (SEE FP) is to promote systems-level thinking about energy and sustainability and foster the development of an integrated view of the economy, society and the environment.

The SEE FP is being offered in partnership with six academic units —  the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE), the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), the School of Integrative Biology (SIB), the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES),, the School of Earth, Society and Environment (SESE), and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP)— which are also contributing teaching faculty.

This program was approved by the Senate of the Urbana-Champaign Campus at its Sept. 21, 2015, meeting, and enrolled its first cohort of students in late fall 2015.

By the end of FY16, there has been more than 40 students attending this program while additional 15 students are applying for this program. The number of students participated in this program is still increasing.

In this program, practice and theory are combined perfectly. Senior students will be involved in capstone courses, where students can apply their learning about sustainability as a team. In these courses, faculty can train them to solve real-world problems faced by industry, government and nongovernment organizations. Another important kind of lecture is to teach students how to communicate about sustainability, including writing and presentation, which make students not just practitioner but also the propagandist.