There are thousands of classes at the Unviersity of Washington which touch on various aspects of sustainability. Our featured courses page highlights a few of them as an introduction, and here we offer some suggestions on how to dig deeper using MyPlan.
Sustainability reaches much further than the environment. In 2015, we identified more than 4,000 courses at the UW which are connected to sustainability, using search terms in the economic, social and environmental spheres. We have provided some of the search terms below as suggestions to help you find sustainability courses which work for you. You can use these terms to search MyPlan and find courses.
You can also look through the UW course catalog and time schedule for more course information.
KeyWords List:
Environmental adaptation |
Social activism |
Economic consumption |
To arrive at the number of sustainability classes, using the Earth Charter, we identified 30 search terms for each of the spheres of sustainability (economic, social, environmental) for a total of 90 search terms. We queried the UW course catalogue using these search terms. Original result produced over 8,000 courses. 700 were excluded for being non-related to sustainability, approximately 3,500 were identified as duplicates resulting from courses identified by multiple search terms. This left approximately 4,800 courses. These courses were then reviewed and identified as either sustainability-focused or sustainability-related. Courses such as "Topics in...", "Survey on...", "Special Topics", capstones, research, etc. were identified as sustainability-related. After all the courses were identified, we reduced our list to the smallest number of keywords that produce the same results. The table of these keywords is below. To find sustainability focused and related courses, search MyPlan with these terms.