In the first two years, students in JESP will be on Georgetown’s Hilltop campus and take foundational courses on the environment, including environmental science, justice and ethics. These core courses draw on the liberal arts curriculum from the College of Arts & Sciences that cultivates students’ skills in analysis, interpretation and expression.
Students will spend their junior and senior years studying on the Capitol Campus in downtown Washington, DC, where they will build on their foundational courses and customize their curriculum to match their own interests. While there will be several set pathways and courses students can choose from, third and fourth-year students will be encouraged to work with their academic advisors in JESP to take other courses and tie them to their environmental and sustainability studies.
Hands-On Learning in the Field
Throughout each of the four years in JESP, students will also engage in experiential learning and immersion experiences to deepen their understanding and engagement with their studies.
Randall Amster, teaching professor who was a leader on the team that developed the new program, said experiential learning is essential to give students the ability to develop and utilize the toolkits they’re learning about in the classroom.
“Experiential learning helps build capacity in the next generation of changemakers around a very profound and even potentially existential issue,” Amster said. “We’re talking about helping to build out a robust toolkit to address these complex challenges that are all interconnected, whether we’re talking about food, water, energy, climate, health or transportation. These things all have ecological components.”
As students in their first and second years in the program build out foundational skills, they will experience what the program calls “interruptions and integrations” at the beginning and end of each semester. In each of these bookend modules, students will apply the foundational knowledge learned throughout the semester to the real world. These modules will also enable students to connect to the subjects they’re studying and see how their studies can be applied in their own lives.
Juniors and seniors in JESP will have the opportunity to spend a semester abroad in places like Ecuador, Madagascar, Samoa, Tanzania, Greece and South Africa, or stay in DC and work with local organizations to apply knowledge from the classroom to a professional setting. Students living on the Capitol Campus will also have access to internships and partnerships with local nonprofits, federal agencies and other organizations working on environment and sustainability issues.