April 19, 2007
Real and important work: Keystone projects connect UW grad students to pressing regional environmental issues
Will Mari
University Week intern
Graduate school is often thought of as a place for lofty thoughts and ethereal intellectual experiences, but the Program on the Environment (PoE) offers a Keystone course that is anything but abstract. Students in the course devote all three quarters of an academic year to working on real-world projects that tackle pressing environmental issues from around the Northwest.
The Keystone course is the core of the Environment Management (EM) Graduate Certificate Program offered by the PoE. Students in the program are concurrently enrolled in a wide variety of graduate and professional programs, including engineering, public affairs, business, Earth and space sciences, the School of Marine Affairs, the College of Forest Resources, and international studies, among other fields. But they hope to use their degrees in jobs related to the environment. To earn the certificate, the students take three required classes that explore environmental decision-making from the perspectives of science, business and policy, followed by the Keystone course.
“The idea is that the projects are relevant, regional, environmental issues that have business, science and policy components to them,” said Victor Yagi, the graduate program coordinator for the PoE. “It’s applied knowledge and it’s also making contacts with people out in industry.”
In the Keystone course, four to five students from different fields form a team to take on a significant, local environmental problem brought to them by a community partner. Partners include government agencies, private businesses and nonprofit organizations.
This year there are four projects with partners that include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Port of Tacoma, the UW and the city of Seattle. The projects are made possible by a three-year, $600,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, which not only funds the projects but also supports five Luce Fellows who serve as student project managers, faculty mentors who assist in team leadership and project management, and a speakers series featuring well-known experts in the fields of sustainability and the environment.
The interaction fosters relationships between the UW and the local business and governmental community, EM staff said.
“I think they [the community partners] get a sense of, ‘We could go to the University for help on real problems,’ which sometimes may not be their first thought,” said Clare Ryan, the EM program’s faculty director.
As for the students, Ryan said they learn a lot from doing the projects, and may meet potential employers in the process.
Because the purpose of the Keystone course projects is to bring together graduate students from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, much emphasis is placed on teamwork and an interdisciplinary approach to complicated policy questions. The Keystone project team working with the Port of Tacoma on developing an environmental management system is a case in point.
“We’re doing real and important work,” said Fatima Oswald, a master of public administration candidate in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs and the team’s Luce Fellow. “They [the Port staff] all have problems that they are giving us an opportunity to help them work on and…solve. They believe that a team of talented graduate students can help them and they were willing to put in the time and open up their organizations to us in order to find solutions.”
Ruth Howell, the Luce Fellow heading the team working with NOAA, agrees. “The novel model of using a graduate student class to satisfy the needs of a local client is a ‘win-win’ for all parties and could be applied in many other disciplines throughout the University,” said Howell, a masters candidate in the School of Marine Affairs. Her team’s “Fish-Friendly Shoreline” project involves a thorough study of the regulatory, economic and social barriers for the creation of salmon habitat in Lake Washington. Their goal is to develop recommendations for an outreach plan based on their findings. Howell hopes that her project, and others like it, will make scientific solutions more practical.
“Our government clients are often strapped for money and time to implement their secondary, but often most innovative, projects,” she said. “By matching an appropriate project to the right group of students, the clients receive free labor by some of the newest and freshest minds on the subject, and students learn first-hand about the real challenges and solutions to solving environmental problems.”
Students in the Keystone courses said that in addition to helping the local community, they’ve learned important management, analytical, presentation and communication skills that they expect will serve them well throughout their careers.
Jenifer Naas, who was a Luce Fellow in a Keystone course last year that dealt with the impact on the environment of Seattle’s food system and ways to improve access to food, said that the experience was invaluable.
“I gained a lot of confidence in my organizational and management skills,” she said. “It was an exercise in negotiation, management of the project and management of people. You don’t really get this when you work on a class project for only a quarter. It was also a great reinforcement of my skills in policy analysis…you have to figure out the problem, connect with your client and then manage the process all the way through.”
Naas is a graduate student at the Evans School and the Department of Urban Design and Planning who is also pursuing a certificate in restoration ecology, which is conferred by the UW’s three-campus Restoration Ecology Network.
An interdisciplinary, pragmatic approach characterizes the PoE and the EM certificate program and is central to the Keystone project’s mission, said Ryan.
“I think it’s…where things are heading and these students are going to be really out in front in terms of some of their skills and some of things they can say they’ve had experience doing, which other graduate students won’t have, really, in their toolkit,” she said.
“If I was hiring someone, I would want to hire someone who had done something like this, because it’s the reality of the work environment.”
For more information, visit the PoE’s Web site at http://depts.washington.edu/poeweb/, or the EM certificate program’s Web page at http://depts.washington.edu/poeweb/gradprograms/envmgt/index.html.
