Framingham State To Offer Green Degree | Graduates would help fill pipeline for local municipalities
Framingham State College hopes to offer a four-year environmental degree beginning this fall to meet the growing need for more professionals with environmental skills, according to Dale Hamel, the school’s senior vice president of administration, finance and technology.
The college has submitted its proposal for the new degree program to the Department of Higher Education.
It’s expected to be approved sometime in June, Hamel said.
The course load for the major would include biology, chemistry and geography.
The school has been told by a number of municipalities that graduates with such a degree would be in demand. Included in that category is Framingham.
“The town is dealing with multiple environmental issues including storm water regulations and water quality issues, and someone with that type of knowledge and background would really meet our needs,” said Peter Sellers, Framingham’s Department of Public Works director.
No matter what project the DPW takes on now and in the future, it will all be vetted for the environmental impact, he said.
“As we plan for the future everything will be more regulated and permitted, and it’s only going to become more rigorous,” Sellers said.
An environmental engineer with a background in biology, chemistry and geography would fit nicely into Framingham’s DPW, which has created an environmental group within the department due to increased regulations and the need to determine each project’s environmental impact, Sellers said.
Katherine Weeks, an environmental engineer in storm water management planning and maintenance in Framingham’s DPW, said the knowledge areas for the new degree would be “a wonderful mixture.”
As computers become a much larger part of every field, skills in geographic information systems or GIS, are very important, she said. GIS is software that helps analyze and show geographic information and can be helpful in planning.
“If they can have the skill set to see what goes in terms of the aquatic life and what the rivers need to be healthy, which would be the biology, and they understand chemistry, which would help them understand what it takes to clean the environment after a particular pollutant may have been dumped into whatever water body you have, they’ll have the basis to understand why you design treatment systems a certain way,” Weeks said.
And the GIS and other computer modeling tool skills are also important because many real estate developers use the same programs, she said.
Hamel said as more companies design and construct green-certified buildings, designated as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), graduates with an environmental degree will also become more in demand.
Once the program is approved in June, school officials plan to offer it to existing students within the school in September, and then make it available to new students beginning in January 2010, Hamel said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments