Achievement

Our fall core course consists of a series of faculty guest lectures on various disciplinary approaches to rapid environmental change. One week prior to the start of fall classes, we learned from our external advisory board that our trainees wanted greater integration between the diverse topics in our fall core course. We decided to ask the students in the course how best to achieve this integration. We used the first day of class to develop a format for discussion that we subsequently shared with faculty. The students generally thought that the discussions worked well and were pleased at our flexibility. One student remarked, "I don't think we accomplished everything we set out to do but we had a lot of really good discussions and I feel like I learned a lot."