Action | Student News
Chasing a Master's Degree Online
by Jean Lynch, MEM '06
They aren’t your usual students. But then, this isn’t your
usual environmental degree program.
The first eight DEL-MEM students are all experienced environmental
professionals in the field working full-time jobs. They are
able to pursue a graduate degree at the Nicholas School by
taking advantage of a new cutting-edge professional program
that’s made up of a flexible mix of distance learning and
week-long sessions based at the Nicholas School: the Duke
Environmental Leadership-Master of Environmental Management
program.
In December, the DEL-MEMs came from around the country to
Durham for their end-of-semester wrap-up. We joined their
“reunion” briefly to talk to them about their first semester
and what they think about the program. What follows is that
experience in their own words.
The students enrolled in the DELMEM 2006 inaugural class
are:
- Mark Boatwright, regional
environmental protection specialist with the Bureau of Indian
Affairs in Juneau, Alaska;
- Joele Doty, education coordinator
with the National Park Service in Homestead, Fla.;
- Julie Elmore, an environmental
scientist with Buck Engineering, an environmental engineering
and consulting firm in Raleigh, N.C.;
- George E. “Gef” Fisher Jr.,
an environmental specialist specializing in water quality
issues for SpecPro Inc. in Lorton, Va.;
- Kathleen Kutschenreuter,
an environmental protection specialist at EPA headquarters
in Washington, D.C.;
- Kathy Romaine, a senior
project scientist with Blasland, Bouck & Lee Inc., an
environmental consulting firm in Cranbury, N.J.;
- Christopher Smith, senior
adviser, Global Environmental Health and Safety/ Hazard
Communication at Pfizer in New London, Conn.; and
- Susan Thorneloe, a senior
environmental engineer at EPA’s Office of Research and Development
in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
What attracted you to the DEL-MEM program?
Kathleen: I have two bachelor’s
degrees and almost 10 years of experience in my field, and
I’ve been wanting to get my master’s degree. ... [When I visited]
other graduate programs, I found that I was asking different
questions from the other students, not because I was smarter,
but because I have all this experience. I felt like I was
on a different page, and I had a hard time with the idea that
I would be in school with people who didn’t have any work
experience. So this program gave me an alternative. Now my
classmates have an average of 10 years of experience in the
field, and we’re learning from each other. We’ve all had different
experiences and are doing different things in the field, but
the level of inquiry and debate is really compatible, and
that makes for a much richer and more practical and rewarding
experience.
Joele: I was looking to be
able to go to grad school while I had other things going on
in my life. . . . and I was looking for something that was
applied to the real world. I have an undergraduate degree
in biology, and I took all the purely academic hard sciences
as an undergraduate. But I wanted to learn how to use that
information in managing ecosystems in the real world. I enjoy
that my classmates have already worked in the field, and it’s
good to hear their perspectives. They have a lot of knowledge
about what’s really going on out there.
Mark: I’m certainly going
to benefit from having a second professionally oriented master’s
degree. Looking at the program’s curriculum, the coursework
has more to do with the kinds of things that I’m currently
interested in learning and can apply to what I’m doing on
the job. Though it doesn’t hurt that I’m at Duke.
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