Everyone in this Masters program is studying Biodiversity, Ecology and Environment (BEE) and then there's seven subdivisions (spanning health to paleontology to museum studies to urban planning). I'm in Société and Biodiversité (SeB) joining in for the 2nd year of Socio-Ecological Transitions and Transformations track (TTSE). This program is only in its 5th year, and of the 15 of us, more than half are going back to school after really fascinatingly varied life paths — my classmates include doctors, architects, activists, engineers, biologists, actors, farmers and social workers, to name just a few. Everyone is super friendly (probably because very few of us are Parisian :)

We'll have classes in econ, methodology, ecology, law, a bunch of field work, and more specialized smaller classes TBC. Some of our classes are shared with the other SeB students who are on the urbanism (BAT) or cultural anthropology track (DCDB).

We're starting with environmental economics, which covers history, accounting and modeling. I'll sort my notes as cleanly as possible, with the big caveat that ecologists love acronyms, and they usually get flipped between languages (ex: GMOs are OGMs in French). First up is environmental economics!

Louis XIII built the Jardin des Plantes as his private medicinal plant stash in 1635. It's also a (literal) zoo, where they put the king's menagerie after beheading him during the revolution. That's also when the French revolutionaries turned the Louvre from a palace to a public museum (vive la révolution!)

The Jardin des Plantes is also the home of the Natural History Museum, which was a school since the start, and was one of the first schools to teach in French (not Latin). It's only a grad school and all the teachers are also researchers and/or work at the museum. We're still waiting on our student IDs but once we have those, more on all the cool things we get to visit.

For now, most of our classes are in Césure, a very cool temporary Tiers Lieu (Third Space) run by Plateau Urbain in university buildings that need to get de-asbestos'd and renovated. More on them later!