This course covers basics in sustainability principles but is primarily a project based course in which the students in the class work on a sustainability initiative on campus. In class we learn about advocacy and the role of movements in sustainability. In this way, the class taught me how progress in sustainability can be achieved and then also gave me the opportunity to achieve it myself.

My group was focused on off campus student life. Initially we were interested in creating a recycling initiative for students living in Oakland. But after meeting with community organizations, we instead pursued an organization dedicated to empowering student renters. We worked to provide students with information on how to talk to their landlord (including how to ask for a recycling bin) and provided a means for students to ask questions about the rental process. Eventually our organization went to become a SORC affiliated club.

Similar to my previous course in GIS, this class provided me very useful skills to help connect my statistics degree with my interest in global studies. In this iterations of the course, I learned many more skills, passing a dozen or so ESRI certification. This is an invaluable skill for my own future employment opportunities. Again, the ability for mapping to visualize trends is incredibly powerful. When combined with rigorous statistics, GIS poses as means of communicating complex ideas. This again embodies values of global studies in that visualization makes information more accessible.

This course taught the basic science behind natural disasters and connected these weather events with climate change. In this way, the class is my most rigorous understanding of the science behind climate change and the way that climate change is effecting natural disasters. I am grateful for a more detailed understanding of the processes and the way that climate change will affect certain areas of the global.

Similar to my Introduction to Global Studies course, this class really changed the way I thought about the world and what exactly I’d like to pursue within my professional career. The class detailed how health is related to global capitalism. We covered a range of topics from food systems to mental health to climate change. While we studied these damaging effects, we also learned about resistance to global capitalism and the growing strength of social movements. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea of a social movement lead globalization and the hope that I had originally felt in learning global studies was given a tangible form: in the study of social movements.

This course builds upon the ideas I learned in my earlier political science class. As I’ve developed an interest in the relationship between social movements and international organizations this class appealed to me a means of formalizing the strategy behind these relationships. We study how objectives influence behavior in very logical, mathematical ways. These methods are helpful in understanding the complexity of international climate action and the need for alternative means of action outside of our current system. In this way the course connected closely with my thesis work.

This course provided me with qualitative analysis skills that were very useful in the writing of my thesis. I learned how to rigorously analyze categorical data and report findings of models from logistic regression to PCA. It was again very helpful in the writing of my thesis and provided me with the ability to effectively use the methods I deployed in my own research.

This course presented me with the economic perspective on many global issues. It presented a way of thinking very different from the political science and sociology course I took, such that I think it was a valuable course to challenge my own ways of thinking and to gain a better understanding of how the logic of global capitalism influences global politics.

In this course we talked about the effects of colonization on Latin American society but also generalized these topics into wider conversations about human nature. We read Gramsci and discussed hegemony in the context of post colonial Latin American education systems. This course allowed me to study the global phenomenon I am interested in within a single region.