This piece originally appeared in The Eagle Online and was written by Caleb Ogilvie with editing from Soumya Sahay, Clair Sapilewski, Sara Winick and Abigail Pritchard and copy-editing by Luna Jinks, Isabelle Kravis and Charlie Mennuti. Click here to see the original piece on their site.
After finishing her journalism and graphic design undergraduate studies at Southern Methodist University, Zoë Mattioli knew her career needed to pivot to sustainability. Now an American University graduate student, she said lobbying for environmentalist causes was most pressing because of the worldly implications of climate change.
“We can’t have events, we can’t have businesses, we can’t travel the world if everything is in crisis,” Mattioli said.
Mattioli also knew employers wanted people with business skills when recruiting. So, she decided to take classes in the Kogod School of Business’s Sustainability Management Masters program.
She, and other students, have used the program to pitch sustainability projects to organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, create responses to a Congressional hearing and manage teams of students developing a sustainability project.
“It’s really crazy to think how quickly I’ve learned so many things,” Mattioli said.
This academic year, Sustainability Management faculty are teaching graduate students more business skills than ever before.
Leaders added new analytics, entrepreneurship and finance courses to the 11-year-old program in the fall 2023 semester, according to the Kogod website. The curriculum additions come as businesses are looking to make their operations more environmentally friendly, according to Program Director David Bartlett.
“There’s an obvious premium on students who can combine a knowledge of sustainability core business skills, but also analytical or quantitative skills,” Bartlett said in an interview with The Eagle. “We’re hearing a lot about that, so we’ve kind of prioritized that in our curriculum.”
Students in the program take a mix of business courses, specialized sustainability courses and courses outside Kogod, which few other programs offer, according to Bartlett.
Across the curriculum, courses focus on policies, laws, non-governmental organizations, environmental science and business, and include faculty from those specialties, according to Bartlett.
All the while, Bartlett said, the program has “an explicit, unapologetic business perspective on sustainability.”
To him, that focus matches businesses’ roles in combating climate change. Young people and profits are favoring sustainability, so business leaders are valuing it more, he said.
“The really successful businesses take sustainability seriously and they’re embedding it in their strategy, in their human resource relations, in their strategic partnerships, in their product design and so on,” Bartlett said.
Those businesses, in turn, can help push environmentalism, he said.