Dear friends and alumni of ESP and RESS,
Hello from Happy Valley. Our fall colors have crested and the chill in the air each morning foreshadows the colder days ahead. But perhaps if we didn’t have our gray pause of winter, we wouldn’t appreciate the tulips and Eastern red buds as much as we do when April rolls around.
Our online programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level continue to grow in popularity and attract and retain exceptional students from around the world. Both our Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems (RESS) and Energy and Sustainability Policy (ESP) offerings maintain strong enrollment despite a field of ever-increasing competitor programs from peer institutions.
The Local Climate Action Program (LCAP) is a two-semester experience for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, which partners students with a Pennsylvania-based local government to support local scale greenhouse gas emissions inventorying and climate planning. We offer generous flexibility in how we fit these courses into students’ degree plans and have had eight RESS and twenty ESP students over the past three years participate. This program provides students with highly sought-after skills related to carbon accounting and management, data analysis, and climate policy and planning while providing local governments with capacity building and technical assistance. ESP and RESS students have partnered with communities as small as tiny boroughs like Doylestown with a few thousand people all the way up to entities as large as the cities of Erie and Scranton, Bucks County, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. LCAP was recently recognized by an Excellence in Community Engagement Institutional Leadership Award from the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for providing students with innovative skills and experience. The fact that we’re able to deliver this real-world experience to students who are studying at a distance is just one example of the ways we seek to innovate in our online educational endeavors to ensure our students get the best possible experiences, on or off campus.
As we look to the year ahead, we welcome Dr. Jennifer Clemons to our faculty. We are always eager to hear about the work you’re doing now that you’ve finished your degree and we welcome the opportunity to partner with you.
Wishing you all the best,
Brandi J. Robinson
Associate Teaching Professor
Director of Online Programs