Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Narrator: A school unlike any other. The first in the nation. The School of Sustainability. This is my Sun Devil story.

Natalie Fleming: My name is Natalie Fleming, and I’m getting a BA in sustainability. I am in the society track, and my focus area is food systems and nutrition which is not one that is commonly taken by people because it’s sort of something that I’ve started myself, and that’s something great about the School of Sustainability because you really have the opportunity to pave your own way like that.

The experience has been amazing. The classes are rough but that’s what I like about them. They’re challenging. They have, I think, more real–world experience than probably any other school on campus.

Colin Tetreault: I am a master’s of art student in sustainability here at the school. The program is rigorous in its orientation. It has very high standards not only of application and admission, but also for course work and for, in my case, practically applied with it as well. So I feel it has been rigorous enough yet a nurturing and inviting environment that allows people to succeed, but holds them to very high standards.

The university itself provides a vast wealth, breadth and depth of knowledge for me to draw from. It’s a practically applied real–world experience that grounds academic knowledge and learning within the real world, so you can actually have a physical manifestation of your academic work.

Auriane Koster: So I’m a PhD student and for my dissertation, I’m understanding why Thailand has decided to implement renewable energy. My undergrad was environmental science, and just by studying that, I realized there’s more to it than that. There’s more to it than just the environment, and the School of Sustainability being the one and only and the first of its kind, really gave me the opportunity to look at problems ore holistically and look at problems in a different light.

When I came out here, for me, sustainability was energy. That’s what I wanted to study. That’s all I really knew about sustainability, and I’ve gained so much knowledge just by coming here and by being in this program and realizing it’s more than just energy. It’s everything. It’s everything you do, every part of life. Everything you study has some sort of sustainability connotations to it, and the school really is providing me with the opportunity to look at things on different levels and on different scales.

Christopher Robinson: I’m enjoying majoring in Chinese. It’s one of the reasons why I’m doing that is because I want to get involved on an international level. I want to be able to help work among—encourage cooperation with different countries and cultures to try and help solve sustainability issues. I decided to start off with Chinese because you know the relation between United States and China are becoming more and more intertwined.

Going to school here, they really emphasize being able to look at it from different angles and seeing how each view point provides you new insight and new solutions and ideas to approach the problem. When you’re looking at it from just like one discipline, you get stuck in this mindset of okay it has to be like this. Here almost everyday we get to look at it from a different perspective in every class. You start to see how the different concepts start to overlap.

Natalie Fleming: I’m living currently in sustainability house at Barrett SHAB which I will encourage all the incoming freshmen to live there, but it’s great. It’s a way that you can really get plugged into sustainability. I mean for me personally, being from out of state, was a great way for me to find out where the cool places to go hiking are; how to garden because we have a garden on our roof which is the only green roof on a dorm on campus.

The community as a whole is called SHAB, sustainability house at Barrett, but within that community is the School of Sustainability community. So it’s great for those students because not only do they get to be a part of the broader community that includes students who are in other majors and do have different perspectives, but it also has those that are in their major that they can study with, that they can hang out with, that they’ll get to go to special School of Sustainability specific events.

Colin Tetreault: Study hard, it’s a competitive program, but that hard work will reap very large dividends for you. Your knowledge will be expanded. Your connections will be increased, and your ability and potential to make a demonstrable impact is almost assured.

Auriane Koster: Sure you can come into this program, spend your two years, get your master’s thesis, and then get out of here and it’s over with. Or you can come in here and interact with the faculty, interact with the students. Say I don’t like how this is working. I think we should make changes here, here and here. You have an opportunity to be involved. It’s a really great opportunity to be involved in your own education.

Natalie Fleming: If you have an opportunity to, I would contact a current student too, and I, personally, would be more than willing to talk to any of the students because its’ really hard, especially for out–of–state students. I mean I was in those shoes. It’s hard to really fully understand what’s going to be there when you get there, so I guess just getting inside look on things and really feeling it out. But I told you to come because nothing can beat this.

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