Day Two ~ first real day of class

· 09.07.2023 · school

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!

the garden of plants