The Environmental Studies degree
programs are designed to ensure that students graduate with specific knowledge
and capabilities desired by potential employers and graduate schools.
General understandings of:
- The history of environmentalism and environmental
politics
- Basic and advanced ecology, with particular focus
on urbanized regions
- The properties of chemicals and their impacts on
the ecosystem
- Evidence-based research methods to understand
environmental change
- Understanding and interpreting quantitative changes
to the environment
- Testing relationships between causes and effects in
the environment
- Economics and decision-making
- Social and political processes that affect the
environment
- Urban systems and the use of resources
- Design methods to change consumption patterns
- Geographic differences in environmental conditions
- Public policies that affect the environment
- Environmental risk and risk disparities
- The role of science in establishing environmental
policies
- Visualizing information to inform and persuade
Specific
capabilities to:
- Design and carry out an environmental research
project
- Analyze water and air quality
- Diagram basic ecological processes, such as water
and carbon cycles
- Map materials flows
- Interpret comparative lifecycle assessments
- Analyze whole-of-life costing
- Gather and analyze social and demographic data
- Map social and environmental data and interpret the
results
- Critique an environmental risk assessment
- Develop soft systems maps of interrelated urban constraints
and variables
- Devise field tests and prototypes of sustainable
designs
- Observe and analyze urban environmental behaviors
- Conduct basic surveys
- Do basic descriptive and inferential statistics
- Use design, mapping, and statistical software
- Research, analyze, and write about environmental
issues
- Participate in government decision-making at local,
state, and national levels
- Organize
and work in teams to solve complex problems