Environmental Social Sciences

Graduate Program

The Environmental Social Sciences PhD program offers subplans in Global Environmental Policy (GEP) and Environmental Behavioral Science (EBS). Each subplan requires students to take core introductory methods courses, attend visiting-speaker colloquiums, enroll a first-year workshop sequence, write a second-year paper, and have teaching experience.

 

Methods

Both sub-plans are required to take core introductory methods courses and develop the advanced methodological skill needed for their area of focus.

Environmental Behavioral Sciences Subplan

  • Core: One introductory quantitative and one qualitative methods course
  • Data Science: At least one class that fulfills the data science requirement. The requirement can be fulfilled by, but is not limited to, geographic information systems, informatics, text/natural language processing, or computational social science.
  • Advanced: Students must develop a plan with their advising team to master the advanced methodological skills needed for their area of focus (e.g., ethnography, field experiments, historiography, interviewing, statistics, survey design, relational analysis, mathematical and computational modeling, and/or randomized control trials).

Global Environmental Policy Subplan

  • Core: Two-course quantitative methods sequence in statistics, causal inference and program evaluation.
  • Data science: Students will be required to take one additional course in data science, which could include classes in machine learning, computer vision, statistical learning, language models, or related topics.

Colloquium

An essential component of the intellectual and professional development of Ph.D. students in Environmental Social Science is regular attendance at the visiting-speaker colloquium.

First-Year Workshop

All first-year Environmental Social Science students will enroll in a three-quarter “Workshop” sequence in either Environmental Behavioral Sciences (EBS) or Global Environmental Policy (GEP). The workshop will introduce students to the breadth of the subplan, focusing each quarter on a different pillar:

Environmental Behavioral Sciences Subplan

  1. Human behavior
  2. Human ecology
  3. Human institutions

Global Environmental Policy Subplan

  1. Environmental economics
  2. Environmental politics
  3. Environmental data science and policy evaluation

Second-Year Paper

A key milestone during the second year of the PhD program is the second-year paper. This paper is frequently collaborative with the student’s advisor or lab members, but must be led by the student and should be of publishable quality. During the second year, the student identifies a 3-person committee - their advisor and two other faculty from the department - who advise and evaluate the second-year paper.

Teaching

Students are required to complete 1 quarter of teaching experience. Teaching experience includes teaching assistantships within the department or another department with approval.