Breadth, depth, and impact
Hear from Environmental Master’s Programs Director Vicky Meretsky, to find the right O’Neill environmental degree for your career.
Description of the video:
The O'Neill environmental programs take advantage of the full range of environmental science and policy faculty in the number one ranked environmental policy and management school in the nation. All of those students can take advantage of the full range of classes in one aspect of their degree program or another. At O'Neill, we're aware of the fact that students come to us with lives, they come to us with passions, and they come to us with budgets. And those are the things that tend to set the degrees apart. For students who need to be out of here quickly or who need to be out of here with as little debt as possible, the Masters of Environmental Sustainability gives students maximum flexibility to interact with policy, management, and science in a one-year time frame and to walk out of here with as much breadth as O'Neill has to offer in your area of interest. MES students tend to go out into things that require them to be able to hit the ground running quickly, knowledgeable about the social science sides of things and things like how grants work, how agencies interact with their stakeholders. If your interests lie primarily in the sciences, the MSES degree will prepare you for a career working in the lab or in the field or working with the public in the sciences, but still savvy enough to understand how policy and law are affecting the science that you're dealing with and the public that's facing it with you. The science degree is going to give students the ability to handle the science and the quantitative aspects of jobs from more purely science perspective than the other two degrees. In terms of overall level of preparation, the MPA-MSES is absolutely our gold standard. You give us two and a half years and we give you two separate credentials that give you breadth and depth on both the policy and the science side. The dual-degree, because of the amount of time that students spend in it, allows students to hit a slightly higher level of job when they go out and arrive, for example, into middle management, but they have the chops to handle that. The O'Neill environmental master's programs are thoroughly committed to preparing students to work in the real world. There is laboratory experience and field experience available in all of the concentrations to ensure that students are not just book learned. Climate change affects the entire world and that means it affects all of the sectors for which we prepare students. Students need to be able to take advantage of the job opportunities out there but also frankly to help solve the problems of the world. Students can work in areas of climate change solutions at the science level as well as at the policy level in municipalities and in agencies and nonprofits around the world. The O'Neill School is unique among programs of its kind in the nation, in that the policy and the science are under a single roof. The faculty work together, they work with students together and the synergy that results from that provides the basis for our number one ranking.
