Environmental & Sustainability Studies Major
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About the Major
The environmental and sustainability studies program provides a foundation in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as well as advanced study in one of three applied focus areas — responsible design and building arts, sustainable food production, or human ecology — to support students interested in responsible design, corporate sustainability, environmental communications, journalism and environmental art.
Jobs in Environmental & Sustainability Studies
- Sustainability manager
- Solar system designer and installer
- Designer and builder
- Environmental engineer
- Farmer
Past Elon Environmental & Sustainability Studies Internships
- The Utopian Seed Project
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- ESPO Trust
- Peacehaven Community Farm
- Seaside Sustainability
Related Majors
Reaping the benefits of hands-on learning — from collecting water samples to building an eco-friendly house
For as long as MaryKate Hart can remember, she has been active in Boston’s Save the Harbor organization, which educates the community about the history of the Boston Harbor and how it went from one of the dirtiest bodies of water in the country to a healthy environment for marine life.
When she was a child, she joined her family on beach cleanups, and as she got older, she took on bigger roles. For several summers, she worked as a junior program assistant, and in the summer of 2023, she was promoted to lead harbor educator.
Working with a group of people who are so dedicated to a project and working with the professor who is so innovative and excited about teaching us how to do everything, it’s been such an unbelievable experience.
She’s been learning about environmentalism and environmental justice and sustainability for so long — including taking a class on the subject her senior year of high school — that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to pursue the topic when she arrived at Elon University in 2022. That quickly changed.
“When I came to Elon, I was a little bit nervous that I would kind of burn out and that I had learned everything I wanted to learn about environmentalism,” Hart said. “That completely changed when I took my lab requirement my freshman fall and I realized that there’s so much more to learn about. Being so involved with environmentalism my entire life, I have such a place in my mind and my heart for it that I realize I can do so much good with all my prior knowledge but also with the dedication I have for learning more.”
Hart, who is set to graduate from Elon in 2026, is majoring in environmental and sustainability studies, with a concentration on responsible building arts and minors in engineering and French. In just her first two years on campus, she has already taken advantage of opportunities to get an array of hands-on experience in her major.
She so enjoyed — and excelled at — her first introductory environmental science lab, in which students collected and tested water samples from Elon’s three lakes, that she was asked by her professor to be a teaching assistant. In the spring of her first year and fall of her sophomore year, she set up all the water quality testing equipment and helped students with the testing process.
“It’s definitely been very beneficial to my learning to be able to explain what I’ve learned to other people to help them understand it,” Hart said, “but also just working closely with professors has helped my professionalism and my organization and my time management.”
She also TA’d in the spring of her sophomore year for an integrated lecture/lab, where among other things, she helped with the students’ final project comparing Burlington’s air quality and health with other neighborhoods they were familiar with.
“Taking the contrast in different communities and different societies is so important especially for students before they go out into the real world, and I think using communities that we know is so important because it allows students to take into context the issues that we’re learning but actually being able to see them with their own eyes,” said Hart, who also cited her classes working with the people of Pittsboro on their clean-water crisis as beneficial hands-on learning. “Seeing what you’re studying in real-life scenarios makes you 100 times more interested and engaged and committed to your studies.”
She credits Elon’s dedicated professors, who understand the benefit of experiential learning, for all the opportunities she’s accumulated.
“I’ve just loved every part of the hands-on aspect of all their classes,” she said. “Every class that I’ve taken with this department has been so engaging and so interesting, and I think that’s thanks to the professors who are just really committed to giving students the best experience possible.”
One of the most rewarding experiences Hart has had so far at Elon has been working on the “Tiny House Project,” where students are helping construct an eco-friendly dorm community at Loy Farm, home to Elon’s Center for Environmental Studies and a hub of hands-on learning through horticulture, agriculture and research.
In the fall of her sophomore year, Hart took the Art of Sustainable Architecture class with Robert Charest, associate professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Studies, which incorporated the project into its lessons.
“I decided to not only take the class but become involved with this group of people and work there,” said Hart, who dedicated four to five hours every day for a year building the first of an eventual 12 sustainable houses at the Living-Learning Community (LLC). “When we started at Loy Farm, there was nothing there except for agriculture, but we started with the structural base and then we went to the exterior and put up the walls, and now we’re on the interior. Working with a group of people who are so dedicated to a project and working with the professor who is so innovative and excited about teaching us how to do everything, it’s been such an unbelievable experience.”
Charest and his group of students are scheduled to wrap up construction on the first home in the summer of 2024, and a total of six homes are set to be ready for residents in the fall, with another six in 2025. (The students are working on only the one house; the other 11 are being designed and built by outside contractors.) Hart said she wishes she could see the project through to the end but already has an internship set up.
For the first summer in quite a while, Hart won’t be working at Save the Harbor — where she would take out groups of kids to the Harbor Islands and teach them about the history of Spectacle Island (how it went from a trash dump that polluted the air and oceans to a national park where residents can safely swim and fish), about the species that live there, even how to fish. She is set to work at Suffolk Construction in Boston as a project management intern, an experience she hopes will help her decide if she wants to go into the construction side of environmentalism.
“Because I have the engineering design minor and the responsible building arts concentration and since I worked at Save the Harbor for so long — and that’s more involved with the political aspect of environmental and sustainability — I want to get on a hands-on project to see if that’s something I’m interested in,” she said.
She still has two years left at Elon to seize the opportunities offered to her and decide how she’d like to focus her career. She recommends that incoming students interested in environmentalism take classes in each of the programs offered and talk with professors before they choose a major.
“I thought I was going into the environmental science aspect when I came to Elon, but I realized that responsible building arts was something I was really interested in because of the art of sustainable architecture and the art classes that were involved with it, along with my minor [in engineering],” she said. “That just allowed me, for the first time, to see my future in some way and to be happy with what I’m studying at all times. I think that’s really the biggest part about choosing your major or your concentration or even your minors is to thoroughly enjoy the classes you’re taking and want to learn more.”
Did You Know?
- Environmental and sustainability studies is a very hands-on major. In synergy with the Elon University Center for Environmental Studies — which oversees the Environmental Education Center at Loy Farm as well as the Community Garden — students can engage in deep, meaningful hands-on (“muddy boots”) experiential learning. Students have the opportunity to work in the gardens at Loy Farm and at the design-build Container Space and environmental studies Maker Hub.
- Students must complete an internship and/or participate in mentored undergraduate research, both of which help develop their professional networks, hone their skills and develop their resumes in preparation for a future job or graduate school.
- The program culminates in a capstone Senior Seminar, in which students work in teams to develop a community-based project, much as they might in a professional setting. Students must be able to analyze data, conduct field research and critically analyze studies and other materials associated with environmental issues.