The Rubenstein School Environmental Sciences major combines a natural science-based core curriculum with field and lab-based environmental coursework designed to engage students in tackling real-world environmental problems. Blending a strong science foundation with hands-on instruction, research, internships, and study abroad opportunities provides students with the knowledge and professional skills needed to identify and respond to complex environmental challenges.
Students gain the knowledge and professional skills needed to address climate change, improve water quality, advance sustainable design, facilitate species conservation, and more. Graduates will receive a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences and will be prepared to use foundational knowledge from diverse fields, critical thinking, and integrative analyses to sustainably manage social-ecological systems and how they interact in air, on land, and in water.
Environmental Sciences was historically offered as a cross-college program. Students enrolled Spring 2022 and prior completed or will complete their degree through one of three colleges: the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. The Environmental Sciences Program is now exclusively offered through the Rubenstein School. It remains an interdisciplinary degree and students continue to learn from faculty across UVM.
Because Environmental Sciences is a broad, interdisciplinary field, after two years of exploratory study, students choose a concentration they are most passionate about to deepen their expertise.
The Environmental Sciences faculty has outlined several concentration options for students to choose from based on pressing environmental issues, student interest, and needs in the job market. Students can, in consultation with their academic advisor, create an independently designed concentration if their interests lie outside the current concentration list.
- Agriculture and the Environment: Impacts of agriculture on the environment and strategies for minimizing environmental degradation.
- Conservation Biology and Biodiversity: Endangered species and ecosystems and strategies for conserving the diversity of Earth's life forms.
- Ecological Design: Use of ecological systems to improve environmental quality.
- Environmental Analysis and Assessment: Techniques for measuring environmental impacts and managing environmental data.
- Environmental Biology: Ecological and molecular analysis of endangered populations, phenomena affecting biological diversity, interrelationship of organisms and their environments, and conservation genetics.
- Environmental Geology: Groundwater, earth hazards, historical climate change, and landscape evolution.
- Environmental Health: Exploration of the link between toxins, pollution, and human health.
- Global Environmental and Climate Change: Analysis of the controls on Earth's climate and ecosystem responses to change.
- Water Resources: Global water supply and human impacts on surface waters.
- Self-design: Are you interested in an environmental topic that is not captured in these focus tracks? No problem, work with your adviser to design your own trajectory!
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