Professional Science Master’s in Environmental Science -Virtual Information Session

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're just going to give everyone a moment to get logged in and make sure that their sound is working. You have a second to adjust your volume, but and then we'll get started and we're so happy that you're joining us.

Excellent. All right. It looks like everybody is logged in. I hope you can hear us. Well, thank you again for being here. My name is Jen Redwanski and I'm the Associate Director for Graduate Admissions here at Stockton University. And I am joined by my amazing colleague, Dr. Tay Trivanti, who is the program chair for our Environmental science program, our our professional Science Masters degree. And we are here to share with you more information about how you can apply to this wonderful program.

And so before I turn things over, I would like to just take a moment to share with you that we are recording this session. So if you are watching this pre recorded, thank you for doing so. If you are joining us live, you are going to notice that there is a chat feature on our webinar here. Please feel free to drop notes into the chat if you have questions. I would ask that you would wait to ask questions towards the end of our session. More than likely we will cover your question throughout the course of the presentation, but then if we don't we all take plenty of time at the end.

To answer those questions, again if you're watching this pre recorded, we will share our contact information with you at the end. So you can also submit questions to us after the fact as well. So without further ado, I'm going to turn things over to you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Awesome. Thanks, Jen.

Welcome everyone.

I just wanted to.

Start by thanking you for showing up for this session, whether you're doing this synchronously or asynchronously In this Gen. stated if there's anything that we cover in here that you're not sure.

Sure about Feel free to reach out to either me or Jane. I will be happy to respond to your questions. So I'll talk about the Professional Science Masters in Environmental Science. And I know that a lot of you may not be familiar with what your professional science master's degree is, so I'll describe why, what it is, and why it's an awesome opportunity, especially for those people who don't want to go into research and but want to.

Progress professionally in environmental consulting.

In the federal government and now we get more and more teachers actually, who are also using this as a source to get income on the side when they are not, when school is not in session.

So I.

OK, so by that take, let's take a minute when the transition there. So the outline of my presentation, we will start by discussing what a PSM degree is.

And when is it better than in a masters degree? Because one of the questions that I often get is, is it better than a masters degree?

A research master's degree, and you notice that it really depends. I wouldn't say that it's better because it depends. For example, I have a Master of Science.

A research masters because I wanted to go into research and go into.

Then continue with my PhD to either work in research or going to academia. So I'll talk about the differences and when it it PSM degree is better than a masters and when the masters research masters is better than a PSM. And then I also go into what the curriculum is and what options you have when you register for this degree. And then of course the more important, most important question here is will I get a job and where will you get a job?

And then I'll have Jen come back at the end to talk a little bit about the application process.

So I actually first heard about the Professional Science Masters degree.

After I got to Stockton.

Around 2006, 2007 and at that time it had just they just started these degrees which they called science professional. In fact now they called them professional STEM Master's degrees. So you see that the designation the way they they're progressing they're encompassing more and more fields and just to out myself, I'm actively involved in the National Professional Science Masters.

Organization and I'm actually on their board of directors nationally. So I get to hear all the cool things that are happening in the changes I I participate in, actually those decisions and making making decisions about what happens to the professional science masters.

So in our last board meeting in Tampa in early November, we actually agreed that we were going to change the name from Professional science Masters to Professional STEM Masters in the two the same degree. But we want it to show that it includes science, technology, engineering and mathematics so.

How does it differ from a normal research masters? Usually when you go into a masters degree, like for example masters in chemistry or biochemistry, your focus is.

In getting to be a good researcher and understanding the basics, or understanding chemistry beyond what you were taught in the undergraduate curriculum in understanding graduate level competence in that subject. But the focus in a lot of these masters Ms. degrees is training you to be a researcher and thinking like a scientist.

In all the courses.

Geared towards meeting that core and they do a great job. I have a Masters of Science, a Master of Science myself, so they good. They do a great job in doing that.

However, we noticed the reason I did a Master of Science myself because I wanted to go and do a PhD in science also in environmental chemistry, and that was the best route for me because he taught me research which I then did for my PhD later. But if you are not interested in going to research route or going into academia, you can actually pick the professional science masters and.

The main difference is that the professional science masters incorporate professional courses that address deficiencies that you see in people who have just a massive science degree, especially if they go into industry and they're trying to manage projects, are trying to write professionally in those ways. Writing as a scientist, it's way different.

From writing as a just for either.

To do marketing or to target clients in the professional, in the sorry in the consulting world. So the skills are completely different.

And the skill sets in terms of just writing for the general public and writing for other scientists, it's night and day really. So what we try to do in the professional science masters is we have the curriculum set up so that at a minimum.

We have in fact the majority of the courses that we have in the professional science masters are basic courses that talk about the discipline and professional courses. So about a third. Depending on how how you select your courses, you can do from 1/4 to 1/3 of your courses.

Because he's that address issues like project management software.

Regulations.

Professional writing.

And other things, even ethics. In a In a few slides, I'll show you some of the courses that qualify as professional courses.

But the other advantage that you have if you have a master's degree.

A professional science masters is that it makes it a lot easier to transition into new carriers because the key competencies that you get are not really discipline specific, like for example if you do project management.

Professional writing and you do quantitative research, You do ethics, you do government regulations, and you do managing software or managing people in general. You'll notice that those skills no one cares what the specific discipline is.

Because those are transferable across the board. So it's actually when you talk about jobs later, you see that a lot of our students, even though they have a professional science masters in environmental science.

They end up working for hospitals, they end up working for biotech firms, they end up working for all these because the the core competencies that they get in the professional courses.

Make it easier for them to transition into those fields.

So professional science masters have been growing in leaps and bounds over the years, especially in the fields of biochemistry, in the fields of pharmaceuticals, And you see that in environmental science. We're just starting to catch up.

Because it gives people the opportunity to focus on very specific fields of environmental science like GIS.

Geospatial analysis, Energy management.

A number of different fields where you if you can imagine having business courses right Project management, Professional writing, ethics.

Any other courses that I help you work in the business environment and then adding the core science courses that make you excel in that field. It's very attractive to employers. That's why they love these professional science masters degrees.

So if you look at the fields where professional science masters degrees are increasing, you see that in the agricultural sciences there's quite a bit in environmental science. Yet Stockton, we actually have two right professional science masters in environmental science and the professional science masters in courses on management.

But other universities have professional science masters in data analytics. They have various forms in physical sciences and aerospace engineering. Forensic science. Cybersecurity is a big thing these days. Biotechnology in financial mathematics, so.

If you just Google it, you'll see that you see all these different articles that tout the.

Cool things that you can do if you have a master professional science masters and it talks about you see success stories from students. We've taken a professional science masters route in their field with this biochemistry whether it's chemistry with its environmental science and.

Be sure to to if when you when you listen to these people you see that pretty much most all of them.

Are people.

Are not really interested in progressing and doing a PhD later in that field. They want to grow professionally in industry.

Where they rise through the ranks of the corporate ladder, so to speak, in fields where usually when you see in in my sense tell me this actually that their biggest problem is that when they go to work, the biggest impediment sometimes at their job is their boss who doesn't know how to manage people, who doesn't know how to manage projects. They may be a brilliant scientist, but because they don't have these skills.

They can't manage anything and it affects everyone. So my students who graduate in this program and we've been graduating people, students since 2009.

Tell me that the most satisfactory, the most satisfying thing that they go through is just understanding having going into your workplace and actually understanding how everything works and in fact.

Students who have this background tend to progress professionally a lot more quickly than people.

With their master's degree, research master's degree in the consulting field or in government or in other places. Because they understand how everything works and it's becoming more and more important to be a whole individual, not just someone who understands, who focuses on understanding just a small part of what you do.

So.

Our learning outcomes for the Environmental Science Professional Master's degree mirror everything that I've just been talking about, right That we want our students, when they complete this degree, to be able to work in multidisciplinary cross sector teams.

That envision policy approaches to addressing environmental problems as they exist in the real world. Because one thing that sometimes we don't make clear as professors is that when we give you projects to work on in class, it's something that I would have worked on myself. If there are problems, usually kinks that make it impossible to understand, I I change it a little bit so that you can work on that project within the four weeks, six weeks that I wanted to work on it.

Are real world problems unfortunately are not like that. Some of them you walk into places where they've been having a problem for the last 62 years and no one has been able to solve it. So you need to to to come in with an open mind to listening to working with different people with differences in opinion, in coming to consensus about how to solve these problems. And you want to be able to do that in the professional science masters really prepares you for that. So we want another thing that we focus on.

When although our course is only professional writing.

But we also want to make sure that the you are able to listen. I have a favorite saying, actually that I heard from Celeste Headlee from NPR, who said that listening is one of the most underrated skills anyway, whether in the family, in class, at work, listening is the most underrated skill. And she said this so much that he said by listening. And she ends that discussion by saying.

No one is ever listened their way out of a job. If you think about it. Yeah, no one has ever listened to themselves out of a job. But you know how this the other side of this, right, that a lot of people top themselves out of a job, out of a relationship, out of it, an opportunity out of your name, you fill in the blank. So listening is really important and then being able to critically.

Evaluate what other people are saying.

And give them space to express that and then be able to respond back showing empathy and understanding.

And it can go a long way. So it's those things that we are now trying to focus on in our courses to make sure that when our students leave, they understand this. And then we are also still going to focus on the basic competencies required for science degrees, read, understand and critically analyze ideas presented in public texts. That's an important skill. And then.

It's still a master's degree and it's a science degree, so we want our students to be able to evaluate research using cutting edge techniques and in our field.

The cutting edge technologies involve geographical information systems, updated computer software that talk about that help manage the workplace. And of course you can't ignore AI so understanding what it means to work with official intelligence.

Systems, whether it's generative AI systems or just sophisticated software that require active participation of the human in the equation.

So.

How do we where these courses and how do you?

Enroll in them so.

Our basic curriculum is pretty simple. It's 36 credits and.

We offer.

Three professional courses that you have to take that are mandatory, but we encourage you to take more and then we offer the science courses that are also required because remember, it's a professional science master's degree.

We offer Environmental Quality, Ecosystem ecology, land use planning, watershed management and applied GIS. Those are the core science courses. The core professional courses are project management, professional writing, a capsule project where you apply all these. But we also encourage you to take courses in ethics because if you count this project, if you count these credits, that's only 24 credits of a 26 of a 36 credit degree.

So we encourage you then from your electives depending on what you want to do. So I have a lot of students who come in and say, well, I want to work for the EPA.

And with the EPA?

The most important things that they value for new employees, apart from just basic competence of understanding environmental science, understanding environmental systems, understanding all these things, they want people who can work well with others. So we encourage students who are who are interested in working for the federal government in general to take courses.

Where and These courses may not be offered in our department, but there are a lot of courses on campus that allow them to.

You can choose courses that deal with.

Writing reports, working as part of a team ethics ethics is actually really big. I told you about the NPSMA board that I save on. There is a mandate now from NSF on a lot of the projects that they fund to have an ethical component so that people were involved in research and not just dealing with the ethics of what they are doing, but the ethical implications.

Of their findings and other issues, which is really exciting. So even if they're not listed as core courses here, we offer they're offered here either on campus or elsewhere. We encourage you to take those depending on where you're headed if you are going into the.

Environmental consulting field.

Their focus maybe and you want to go into hydrology for example.

You see that yes, we have a watershed management course, but if you need extra hydrologic courses, we also will make sure that you get those extra hydrologic courses from here. So I just wanted before I get to the.

Elective courses. Just wanted to show you some of the courses that other professional science masters degrees offer. Professional Science Masters and we try if you are interested in taking some of those courses.

And we don't offer them here at Stockton. We actually allow you to transfer, to take and transfer them from elsewhere. So you see that we go in scientific skills, project management, ethics is showing up on #3 research, development, that leadership course that I was talking about, right. And then communications. And so here we have professional writing, but we will encourage you to also take communication courses that involve.

Listening and working as part of a team and then there are a lot of other.

Discipline specific professional team courses that you can pick depending on where you are headed, where you think you're going to be seeking employment, and we encourage you to do that so we don't have a fixed number of electives that you can take. Even though we we have a few that we offer here. We encourage you to explore wide and get as many of the courses that you really want for your professional degree.

Is possible and we work with you. I generally advise.

I would say most of the PSM students and my attitude going into advising is that I will not tell you what's good for for your career.

You sit and you tell me. We'll go through a few questions together and we talk about, I have a lot of experience, obviously, with a lot of my students who have graduated and what they tell me about some of their frustrations and some of the things they wish they knew going in. So I'll help you with that understanding, but I want you to pick the courses.

That will benefit whatever field you end up going into, and we'll do that together through the years. We have a robust set of courses that we encourage our students to take, and it almost always works out well.

So people have different motivations, right? Some people just want to go out and earn a good living.

And it's interesting as I go through these advice dozens of professional science masters students and.

It's uh, it's it always works out that even people will say, well I just want to start with a good setting salary. I'm tired of being poor. Some of the students will come back saying, well I graduated the biology degree, I graduated with this degree and I just, I just don't see how I can make a living with this. And I wanted masters degree because I know financially it will be good for me.

And then I talked to them at the end of two years when they're about to graduate, or three years, however long it takes them.

And their attitude sometimes is really changed, right? That actually I feel like I need to go into an area where I'm really happy because where you are happy and where you feel. And I I hope this is not the first time you're hearing this, but if you think about it outside of just sleeping in your bed.

Right. From today on, like the rest of your life, the other thing that you spend more time doing.

Is.

So if you think about.

You'll be working more than doing any other activity, and depending on how many hours you sleep at night, really, you actually spend more time at work. I know this very well. I've been here to talk to 20 years. I've spent more time in this office or yeah, or elsewhere related to work than any other activity in my life. So it's really important that whatever you pick and what you end up doing.

That decision not just be focused on getting a good living, but something that you actually enjoy. And if you're a well-rounded person and you already have an advantage, if you're at Stockton, you're already getting a great liberal arts education.

And if you have these skills that help you in that in those professions, you actually be a lot happier and you see that you actually stay in in the same place and progress in the same place, you're more likely to to have more stability when you do that. So I'm just going to go over a few of the things that my students end up obsessing about, even if they start off by saying I just want to make money.

So it is Environmental Quality and we talk about pesticides and how they affect all sorts of things. And we are selfish. We start with how do they affect us, human beings. But then at the end of the day, we also notice that pesticides are destroying bee colonies.

So.

There are no bees for pollination in a lot of in many parts of the world, including the United States, in fact.

I was just in California earlier.

And earlier in the semester, and one of my friends from Graduate School was panicking. Because he's an Ammon farmer, his family is always farmed. They they've a big dairy farm, but they also have all sorts of activities and he helps his parents.

And he was telling me that they rent bee colonies.

From the Northeast, from here, this side of the United States. And they were told by the beehives, the collective that they hired their beehives from, that they're not sending their bee hives to California anymore. And I was like, why? And they said, well, they said we used too many pesticides here. So when they said they've already killed their local resident bees, they they're not bees to pollinate naturally in those areas. So they actually rent these bee colonies and they put them.

In the orchards, in the places where they have these hammonds growing and they they pollinate over time and then they send them back. But they collective was saying no more, we're not sending them to the arm and orchids anymore because you're killing them. You see what people in China are doing, these guys are actually, because it's really difficult.

2008 Astor pollinate.

When they when you don't have insects, what do they do? They create these contraptions that look like brooms or brushes, and they put them at the end of your limbs. And then you climb the trees and you pollinate.

In that I'm laughing, but there's no laughing matter. But this is how desperate it can get.

So there are solutions that you can get from the and by the way, the pollination rate, the efficiency rate of humans versus insects.

Efficiency rates for humans is less than 1% of insects.

Less than 1% and you have to pay people minimum minimum wage or however much and then they get injured.

The workman's compensation claims it gets expensive. So that's something that nature does freely, right. So some of the some of the issues that we deal with and we now have students who have graduated from here who are working on OK, what can we do to re establish.

Bee colonies in their natural environment.

If it involves going back and working with communities so they understand that, hey, the chemicals that we are spraying in the environment.

The things that we're doing are affecting our own survival, really. Because every if you think about what you just eat today.

Whether whether it's meat or plants, pollination was involved in some form. When you propagate, yes, you can have other technologies where you propagate plants without involving pollination, but that becomes difficult after a while. So that's just one example where our students deal with complex issues, issues where they become really involved to the extent that they go and work in those in those fields.

So I like to give this example because it illustrates some of the things that.

That I think we do well, not just here at Stockton in the professional science masters, but professional science masters in general. So there's this story about a farmer who.

Who was having problems?

At his daily farm.

The cows were not giving enough milk anymore and he was losing money because just feeding them.

And having them just sit there and not producing milk, just because usually after a cow gives birth you have a certain number of months that you can get X amount of milk and they were just not getting it. So he had scientists from the local university.

To look at the problem, they came in, they analyzed the dairy farm, they took measurements, they interviewed people, they looked at the cows and then they went back to campus. And then spend a few more weeks analyzing this data.

And then the farmer got a call from the professor, who said it was a physicist who said, well, we found a solution to your problem.

But this solution only works.

To spherical cows in a vacuum.

Imagine being the farmer always being told this. Where do you get spherical cows right? And then how do you create a vacuum for them?

So I tell this story because a lot of the time, and you are probably old enough now to have experience a situation where.

Someone gives you a solution that is completely impracticable, but it is a solution.

How do you work with a solution that you cannot apply in circumstances that you are in, right, if, for example, I work with communities in Ecuador, in Zimbabwe?

And there are things that we take for granted here in the United States, right when this happens. Yeah, you can just do XYZ and you solve the problem. You go to those communities and they don't have access, resources, and other issues. You can't apply the same solutions.

Unfortunately, we see this happening with a lot of international organizations. Where are they going to communities. You hear these terms fly by night experts right? And they prescribe solutions is sometimes, Often times being paid a lot of money is high value consultants to give solutions that are completely impracticable in those situations. So we try to incorporate elements.

That include understanding the real world, not just looking at the science and trying to.

Because just understanding the science and not being able to apply it in real situation.

Is mostly useless. So some of the courses that we elective courses that we offer here instruction.

Include more than now because we have data science and courses on management. You can also use cost of zone management courses. All sorts of cost of processes.

I feel interested in that field. I feel interested in data science. You can also take courses that deal with official intelligence in in the workplace, Data science in general. We also have a number of courses that deal with special analysis, those who want to go into fields of consulting. We do offer hydrology, we do field methods and courses in wetlands, ecology, restoration ecology.

In environmental law. So this, I think over the years we've managed to come up with electives that serve most of our students. But like I said earlier, if you.

Want a course that we don't offer here? We allow you to transfer it from another place.

We also have the dual degree program.

Where incoming freshmen can pick an option where instead of.

Being here for four years and graduating with a with an undergrad degree.

They can stay an extra year and graduate with a bachelor's degree at the end of four years and then a master's degree at the end of the fifth year. So we call that an accelerated program, or the term that you see in most places is to a degree program. It's a nice option for students who also know they want to go into consulting.

And they just stay here the five years and when they start. So they're starting job would be is an advanced beginner in certain areas and we make sure that they have the experience that they need when they graduate so that when they go out they're competing with other people. We have masters degree not competing with people with bachelor's degrees. We have done surveys for employers and employers love these graduates because they come in understanding.

What the workplace looks like.

Within times where we are liberal as institution, we want to pro to graduate.

Individuals who are well-rounded, who understand, who are responsible and well-rounded.

But because we don't have a vocational aspect to our curriculum.

Sometimes the things that employers will complain about is that yes, they are brilliant chemists, yes, they are brilliant biologists, but we want people who can run projects when they get here, right? We want people who are.

We're not socially awkward in in environments where we're trying to interact with clients. We want people who can communicate.

To give the two-minute elevator speech to write a 20 page paper that is required to convince a client that this is the best option. We want them to be able to write a two page.

Description Summary of a project. We want them to write an effective memo to be able to communicate or to sit and listen to a client when they are not. This when they when they are not happy with something.

Company and be able to communicate with them and not make things worse so.

Having this option for undergrads, actually, I think, I think right now in our program we have about 8 students who are involved who are in the accelerated program and they all love that, the ability to be able to just graduate with a master's degree after five years, because if you graduate and come back, you need to do 2 years.

So that's six years versus five years.

So why do the accelerated program or dual degree program? Like I said earlier, saves you time, both time and money, and it's great preparation for the professional world and you do advance faster.

In the in whatever field you go to, you end up in, so.

And.

So the professional and the profile are a typical profile of an annual student and then the national trends you see that it's kind of it's Stockton and.

Nationally, you see that the trends are not very different, right? And I'm saying this because if you're wondering, well, I'm really interested in this, but I'm working. I don't have the time to do this. You notice that the majority of our students are actually.

My tour students who have either graduated and are looking for jobs or in a job that they don't really are not too crazy about, so they want something better.

And so we structure the program to only have courses after hours. So all our courses are taught from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. Sometimes we have Saturday courses, but most of the time it's just 6:00 to 9:00 PM Monday to Thursday. We started with Friday including Friday, not a popular day to have a six to nine class.

But you see that a little of our students.

If you are thinking, well, it's too late. Well, we routinely graduate, in fact.

If you look at our class, it's kind of interesting the the demographic break up breakdown, you find a lot of younger students who are doing the excited program and then mature adults. When I say mature adults, I'm talking about.

People my age and older.

Who have several decades, several decades under their their belt and either deciding to to do something different or want to progress because they feel like they've been stagnant for 20 years.

So the last thing that I'll talk about before I talk about the application is where are people going? Where do you get jobs? The majority, overwhelming majority of our students end up working for consulting firms.

But.

A lot also ended up working for the federal government. EPAUSGS, we do a great job placing students there. We started, we placed a lot of students when we started and they developed a network in those agencies and now they recruit extraction which is which has been great to to witness. And so we have good representation in USEPA region 2 or region one and we have good representation in USGS.

And DEP. As well DEP.

And then county governments and sometimes municipal governments also, But consulting firms by far are the number one.

Area, but we also get, like I was saying earlier, educators who want to get more experience in a different field or also be able to teach.

At a Community College or State College because you need a master's degree to be able to teach in those areas. So that's an additional source of income for for our teachers.

And.

So the requirements for the PSM degree, if you're coming in as a graduate student, you need.

A degree in the natural sciences and the minimum college GPA of three.

And depending on the type of experience you have, we can waive some of these requirements.

So Jen is going to come back and talk about the application process in general.

Awesome Tate, thank you so much and and you've given us.

Definitely the why or excuse me, the the, the why, the how. Let's talk or no, you've done the why. I'm going to do the how.

Yes.

Of the application process. So you've hopefully gained some interest as to why this would be a good program for you. But let's talk about the next step of how you get here. So on our website, all of this information can be found on the program website, but I'm gonna so you don't have to take detailed notes. There's a a list on that page, but I wanna talk through a couple of tidbits that might help you to make your application successful.

And so the first thing is there is an application fee and once you submit that application fee or a waiver code if you have one.

There it populates the essay. You won't be able to see the essay before that. What you also need to know is that there are specific application priority deadlines. So for fall it is July 1st. So for a fall start or for a spring start start December 1st, so we've already passed that. For this spring, however, applications still can be reviewed, but.

You wouldn't be considered for the priority registrations and things of that nature. So that's why you want to meet those deadlines. It helps you to be academically successful. The other thing is, is that we do have specific international deadlines and so if you are an international applicant, you will want to keep in mind those deadlines as well and that can be found on our international applicant page. So as part of the application, in addition to submitting your essay, you will also submit 3 letters of recommendation. You won't actually submit the letter itself, You're going to submit the e-mail address for your recommender.

So we suggest that you reach out to your recommenders first, let them know that you're going to be putting their e-mail address on there, and then go ahead and you'll put those 3 e-mail addresses and names into the application. All of it is done electronically. It sends to them and they complete their their information from there. In addition to that, you'll be submitting a copy of your resume that should be loaded in APDF format, and then we also will need to receive all official transcripts for your application, so that's any.

Two year, four year or graduate coursework that you've taken previously. So if you have an associate's degree, we we need a copy of the transcript for both the associate's degree and your bachelor's degree for your application.

If you are a Stockton student, you can request to have us pull that for you. We can do that as a service. However, if you attended any other institution other than Stockton, we would need you to have that submitted to us. The best way to do so is to have it sent electronically through e-mail. You can e-mail it to grad school at stockton.edu. That gets to us the quickest. Sometimes if you click the automatic drop down from your institution, that will send to our student records office and then all that. We can still retrieve it, But if you send it to gradschool@stockton.edu.

We get it very, very quickly. We can also take copies mailed to us and our e-mail or our mailing address is on our website too.

Lastly, we do have the direct entry application option for Stockton students who are within one year of graduating. So if you are graduating in May, it is good for one year after that point of commencement and the specific details on that, it's a specific GPA and course undergraduate requirements are there and that is a different application. So you'll want to just note that as well. So you'll see here this is our website. The apply button is that yellow one on the side. You will also notice on the left it says graduate programs. You can choose this program specifically and then from there click on the admissions criteria which will give you the drop down of.

Checklist items that we just discussed. So that should that will be helpful to you in that process. All right. So that brings us to the final part of our presentation and that's where we'd like to turn things over to you. For those who are joining us live, if you have questions please feel free to put those into the chat. If you're joining us from a pre recording, we thank you for sticking with us and listening and I hope that you found some great information from this session. I know in particular Tate I think your words of wisdom about listening and.

Protecting the environment and also choosing a career that you love going to every day stuck out in my mind as important aspects of this whole process as well. So thank you. I enjoyed that even myself.

But so you'll notice our contact information here. You can feel free to e-mail e-mail us here at grad school at stockton.edu and Tate's information is on there as well if you have real, specific questions about the program itself.

I don't see any specific questions in our chat right now, so we'll give it just another moment. Tate, is there anything else you'd like to add as we we conclude today?

Not not really. The only thing that I just wanted to highlight is that.

Is you is if you are a graduating student, a graduating student. Take advantage of the direct entry application because after, like Jane said, after one, after eight years passed after graduation, you have to do the full application. If you're doing direct entry or you're doing, where's your Stockton student? We have all your records. All you're doing is just doing an essay.

And explaining why you are coming back.

Yeah.

In drezemy sorry. Endresoming sorry.

Essay in essay and resume, but very simple. You know, at this point in your college career we would assume that you would have a resume, so that should be easy. And yes, again, it's just putting a little bit of effort into that, that one essay, which is, which is really lovely. The specific requirements for that just to share with everyone.

Is a cumulative GPA of a 3.25 or higher and basic knowledge of chemistry, GIS, hydrology or sciences and physics. So if you were again a Stockton student in one of the NAMS majors, you will more than likely be able to cover that without a problem.

I also want to highlight that for our international students, this is one of our programs that does take international applicants and but there is a specific page for our international applicants and you'll want to highlight that and the specific deadlines. So let me mention that because I didn't mention that in the last slide, but for our fall enrollment, the deadline is November 1st and for our, excuse me first spring enrollment is November 1st and for our fall enrollment it is March 15th. The admission criteria is just slightly different in that we do need to receive a transcript that has been.

Reviewed and so for international transcripts, you can have your transcript reviewed by either World Education Services or we call it Wes or Educational Credential Evaluators or ECE. The third one that we can also take is Span Tran, but we would have to receive your official transcripts from one of them to complete your application too. In some cases, submitting a proof of English proficiency would also be required for a completed application, so.

So, Tate, we do have one question here. In the chat it says I'm interested in environmental justice. Are there any electives on this topic specifically, or do other electives or courses cover environmental justice? Great question.

So yeah, they are. Right now we don't have any specific electives that cover environmental justice, but we have two professors here who teach courses in the undergraduate curriculum in environmental justice. So what we've been doing, when we have students who are interested in areas that that we are not covering in electives at the graduate level, we talk to those professors who are teaching at the undergraduate level and.

Pretty much all the time they will accept to have you in their courses and give you graduate work so you get graduate credit so you can actually do it that way. If you if it doesn't work out for you, you can do it as a separate independent project with that professor. And another option is for you to find a course that deals with environmental justice from another university and you can take it at that university and we can transfer it back here.

And it will count. So we can do that for a two or three courses in fact.

All right. We have one additional question. The question is from a candidate that says that they're currently doing research on the effect of mining on farm lands. Can they use that as a capstone project if they were to come to the Masters program?

Definitely. So one of the reasons we have a capstone project is that we often get.

Students who if if they don't have any experience, say for example a biology student who only has ecology experience and they feel like, yeah, when I was in undergrad I really enjoyed apology, but now I want to go into environmental remediation but they have 0 experience in that field.

We encourage them to go and work with environment and we have contacts that we can get them linked to and they can go and do a capsule experience in a remediation field. So they have it's like an extended internship.

Where you end up writing a paper, so you become not necessarily subject expert, but you become really good in that area so it gives you a leg up. So in order of the capsule experiences that our students end up with, count like experience really like real experience when they apply for jobs.

So if you are doing something that you you already love and you want to use that in your future, and it's part of what you're interested in doing after graduation, hey, more power to you will help you come up with a question. Because we want you to learn something beyond what you're doing. In case you're just working on routine stuff, want you to come up with a question that you can then ask and try to solve, and then work within those parameters for you to make it your capsule, definitely.

Great questions by the way, to both of you, Emily and Said.

Yes, great questions indeed. Thank you.

All right. I don't see any additional questions in the chat. So Tate, thank you again for taking the time to share you know more about your program and and just more insight in general into the field of environmental science. I think it's an important area that is, is so critical right now and and it was really an enjoyable presentation. So thank you and thank you to our participants.

There's one exorbitant.

I Yep. So, Seth, I I see that you have some real specific questions. Why do we take those offline? This is a recording we'll share with others. We'd be happy to chat with you though. So please feel free to to reach out to us at the contact info on here and we can talk through that a little bit further with you too.

Yeah.

Umm, So Tate, thank you again. Thank you to our participants. I hope everyone has a wonderful afternoon or whatever time of day it is, wherever you are and whenever you're watching this. Take care everyone. Thanks and bye. Bye.

Thanks. Yeah. Thanks.