Dickinson College

My Environmental Research Methods and Civic Engagement course researched and wrote a report for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to provide community engagement and environmental justice recommendations as they decide whether to adopt RGGI (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative). RGGI is a cap-and-trade program partnership across states in the American Northeast that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through market-based incentives. To ensure that the program is developed and implemented in an environmentally just way, we researched, analyzed, and wrote chapter sections pertaining to how previous cap-and-trade programs implemented environmental justice, best practices for community engagement initiatives, and concerns that Pennsylvania residents had about air pollution in their communities. We also conducted interviews with experts in air pollution, community engagement, environmental justice, as well as community members affected by greenhouse gas pollution. 

For my Environmental Studies senior seminar, I created a short documentary about how sustainability and nature are represented in various languages and cultures. I interviewed friends and professors at my school who speak multiple languages fluently, recorded and transcribed their responses, and edited together a cohesive video that contrasts US perspectives of nature with those globally.  

I designed, conducted, and wrote a psychological study on a reanalysis of narrative data related to memories of college acceptance narratives for my Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology course. Of interest to me was how the “life script” (the culturally accepted trajectory of a typical life) affects the way that people remember and recount their life experiences. Skills I gained from this project include planning and designing my study, conducting a comprehensive literature review, coding narrative data, analyzing the coded data statistically, and compiling all the necessary components for an APA-style report. I was grateful for the opportunity to design my own psychological research and see it through to completion on a topic that has not been studied very thoroughly.

My Sustainable and Resilient Communities course tasked me with identifying a region of the world and assessing its sustainability or climate action plan. Due to my study abroad experience, I chose to evaluate Copenhagen’s sustainability plan. I conducted research on both citizen and governmental views of sustainability and the city’s progress in reaching its stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2025. I then synthesized this information to create an evaluation of the city’s progress. This project allowed me to gain experience in evaluating sustainability policy. I also was able to engage globally with the city, comparing its approaches to climate change mitigation to those in the United States.

I designed, researched, and wrote a literature review about incorporating insights from the behavioral and social science fields to inform climate change communication and mitigation initiatives. This research encompassed what area of sustainability I am most passionate about. Skills I gained from completing this project include researching and summarizing key points from peer-reviewed literature, planning and seeing a comprehensive report to completion, and synthesizing a multitude of literature on the topic into a single literature review that made structural sense. I am excited to take what I learned throughout this process into the behavior change and climate change fields.

I began my investigation into behavior change in the sustainability sphere with this paper I completed about climate change apathy from a systems perspective. I created a visualization of the system that I analyzed, incorporating scientists, politics, the media, and the environment as actors in a system centered around public awareness of climate change. This project gave me the skills to research multiple large topics, narrow them down to their main points, and discuss the broader connections and implications of a holistic system.