When I was a student at the University of Ottawa I spent a lot of my time droning over the courses available in my program. The environment was my thing so I would sit and endlessly read course descriptions in the hopes of finding content that would jump out at me. Imagine how happy I was when I completed my course table full of geeky environmental courses.
Now imagine how unhappy I was when I found out that sometimes the profs of those courses didn't share the.... enthusiasm I did for the subject matter. I don't mean to diminish in any way the capacity of those professors to teach, I just think that my expectations were unrealistically high because of all the searching I had done. I was hoping so hard that the professors would be as geeky about the environment as I was.
Of course the real problem is that not every prof (in my case) would have been an environmental specialist. In the end the course wasn't the problem, what I really needed to know was the interests of my prof. A prof that was interested in the environment would have a greater depth of knowledge and could give more little tidbits about the subject matter I wanted to hear about.
So guess what, there already exists a solution to this problem. The faculty websites for uOttawa already list the research interests of their profs. This is the perfect scenario, a prof interested in the subject matter you are interested in and who is teaching the course you want to take.
Well, in our efforts to create tools that better serve the campus, the Office of Campus Sustainability is publishing the list of professors who count sustainability amongst their research interests at the University of Ottawa. The hope is that if you are a student that wants to learn more about sustainability, this list will help you. And if you hope to one day do some graduate work in sustainability, this list could also help be your guide.
The list is divided up by faculty and department and covers a wide range of sustainability related topics, everything from soci-economics to environmental medicine.Take a look, if we missed somebody please tell us so that we can make sure to get them on the list. We hope you find it useful and if you have any other ideas to make the campus more sustainable, send us an email.
sustainable@uottawa.ca
~ jON - campus sustainability managerphoto credit - jonathan rausseo