Hello, Heather! Thank you so much for your kind words and thoughtful questions. Our program serves graduate students from across our university. We have students from the social sciences, including those from human ecology, geography, policy departments, that participate alongside those from engineering and natural sciences. In having students from multiple disciplines in the program and classes together, we can work with them to build confidence in working with those outside their discipline first and then train them to collaborate with stakeholders from outside academia.

Your question about climate justice is a great one and something that we have worked hard to integrate into the program. Students meet leaders working in climate justice and also have the opportunity to visit some of these more vulnerable areas and here from residents. Every year, we hear from the students that one of the most impactful experiences that they have is driving around Newark, NJ with a local non-profit that is working on equity issues, including those related to climate.

As part of our studio experience, we have also worked hard to collaborate with communities that do not have the resources available to help them plan for resilience.

Please feel free to reach out if you'd like any additional information or if anything is unclear.

Excellent!!! The recruitment of graduate students with multi-disciplinary background and inclusion of diverse talents are so critical for building a robust and sustainable ecosystem. Can you elaborate strategies to help students collaborate climate-related projects with non-academic stakeholders representing government and/or the industry?  Thanks in advance for sharing your expertise.

Thank you for your excellent question. To prepare the students to work with the different stakeholders, we have them take a course led by professional boundary workers on communicating with decision makers. We also train them to use mental models as a boundary object to facilitate discussions with different audiences. Once they have completed these trainings, the students participate in a studio course where they work together with a client (e.g. municipal official) to address a resilience related concern that the client is facing. After participating in the traineeship program, students are also often brought on individually as technical advisors to work with municipalities.

Hi, Lydia! Thank you so much for your important question. While we definitely have climate deniers in our state, we are fortunate in that our current state officials have make climate change a priority for the state and planning for the future. We are even the first in the nation to have climate change integrated into all content areas of our K-12 standards. As such, we do not receive much push back from those that we collaborate with.

I will say that we also run a communicating with decision makers course, which does touch on dealing with resistance and skepticism, to better prepare our students to deal with this issues.

I would love to hear more about what you are doing. I will definitely watch your video next and if it makes sense to you, perhaps we can touch base at some point.

Lastly, to address your question about publications, we have published a book chapter about the program. Here's the link: doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-2208-0.ch017. Let me know if you need help gaining access.

Thanks for sharing the paper information! My work with coastal climate resilience was part of my PhD. I've now shifted my focus to STEM education research as a postdoc (the topic of my team's video).

Thank you for your wonderful questions! Over the course of their first two years, the graduate students take three core courses (transdisciplinary perspectives, communicating with decision makers, and a resilience studio course). They also take two elective courses outside of their discipline to learn how other disciplines look at and address a problem.

In addition to the coursework, we ask that our research based students do a disciplinary plus chapter in their thesis related to resilience along the coast (coast being loosely defined).

I love the idea of a group thesis and while we have had a couple of student publish journal articles together, their main publication is the report that they work on together as part of the studio program. Thus, along with their individual research projects, the student participate in a group research project as well.

While we are formally measuring the impact of the program on the students throughout the program through external evaluation, we have not formally measured the impact on the clients. It is something that we have been doing informally through conversations and feedback and something that we hope to develop a more formal mechanism for at a later time.

Thank you so much for your positive feedback and wonderful suggestion to engage with the ACCO. It is definitely a partnership that we should be pursuing. More recently, we have discussed how we can bring this type of systems thinking training to professionals and we are definitely looking at the ACCO core competencies when thinking this through. I hope that once we've piloted something locally, we could connect with larger organizations like the ACCO to expand the training in some form.

To answer your questions about jobs, yes, in going through the program and meeting the various stakeholders, the student learn about different opportunities beyond the academic track. In fact, this program has opened their eyes to the possibilities beyond academia and we currently have 9 out of 12 C2R2 students working in resilience related fields. Alumni of the program are currently employed by private companies (e.g. Princeton Hydro, Michael Baker, EDR, Silman, and Roux Associates), the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, and other academic institutions (e.g. U Penn’s Warton Risk Center).

Personally, I wish that when I was working towards my graduate degree that there had been more programs similar to this so that I was aware of all of the job possibilities out there. I believe that this is so important, especially these days.

I agree. Thanks, Yolanda! This has been extremely helpful in thinking through how to improve and expand the program. So thankful for the feedback!