MODs participants group photo after working in a local park

Overview

MODs – Summer Orientations Modules – has a long history at YSE and has welcomed incoming students for decades. The goals of MODs and YSE's other onboarding experiences are to:

  • prepare students to productively engage in their graduate education by empowering them with timely and relevant knowledge, planning tools, and fundamental skills for their success as individuals and as a community.
  • build community and a sense of belonging by setting the stage for a diverse, equitable & inclusive environment with clearly articulated norms and expectations for a professional school.
  • connect individual purpose and perspective to one's professional goals and to those of fellow students to realize a sustainable future.
  • appreciate "different ways of knowing" and why interdisciplinary knowledge is needed to inform solutions for complex environmental challenges, including the role of science and communication in decision-making.
  • gain experience in collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing real-world data (e.g., Forest, Urban) and applying this information in a broader context of decision-making.
  • make space for degree-specific onboarding exercises that recognize the unique preparation needed for each program.
  • introduce students to the New Haven community and the landscape they will be living, studying, and working in for the next few years.
     

Summer 2024

YSE's 2024 MODs will run in two rotations this August. Incoming students will participate in one MOD rotation from August 13-15, and a second rotation from August 20-22. All incoming students will participate in the Self-to-System MOD during one of their rotations, and in one of the two Science-to-Solutions MODs, either in New Haven or at Yale-Myers Forest. Science-to-Solutions preferences are gathered in the YSE Consolidated Onboarding Survey shared with all incoming students in April. Every effort will be made to give everyone their top choice, but given capacity limits, this may not always be the case.

Self to System

Students will work to gain the tools needed to thoughtfully design and maximize an impactful path through YSE, Yale University, and to their careers and lives beyond Yale.

Students will work through their own personal motivations and variety of lived experiences. This MOD is designed to help students appreciate themselves and those around them and prepare them to maximize their time at YSE.

The Self-to-Systems MOD is led by Peter Boyd

Science to Solutions

Students will work to understand different strategies for knowing, collecting primary data, evaluating evidence, generating, visualizing, and communicating alternative solutions, and iterating, monitoring, and adaptively managing solutions.

Students will experience this MOD via one of two pathways, a New Haven experience or Yale-Myers Forest experience:
 

Science-to-Solutions – New Haven

The New Haven MOD aims to introduce students to each other, to the city that will be their home for the next two years, to the environmental problems that face that city and its residents (both human and other-than-human), and to tools for analyzing and managing those problems. We will look at those problems from various perspectives, including biophysical (soils, vegetation, geologic history), hydrologic (water quality, flooding), legal (Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act), and social (land-use history, environmental justice, community perspectives). Our MOD will explore several natural areas and neighborhoods in New Haven; and our three-day arc of exploration will move From River to Ridge (Day 1), From Reservoir to Coast (Day 2), and From Degradation to Restoration (Day 3). We will learn by direct observation, listening to community groups and professionals, and participating in restoration projects.

New Haven MOD is led by Mark Ashton, Colleen Murphy-Dunning and Shimi Anisfeld
 

Science-to-Solutions – Yale-Myers Forest

The Yale-Myers MOD focuses on the basics of ecosystem management, practicing using different tools and methods for collecting environmental information. The learning objectives focus most intensively on the three objectives that collectively introduce foundational systems measurement and analysis techniques, build an inclusive community, and introduce students to the landscape where they will be living and working. Specifically, this week will focus on two learning objectives that revolve around the concept of an "ecosystem" and the planning, collection and analysis of quantitative evidence (data) that will be used to understand and manage them:

  1. Understand how the ecosystem concept is used in sustainable resource science, assessment, and management.
    a. Familiarization with the "ecosystem" as a conceptual tool
    b. Familiarization with the "ecosystem" as a practical tool
    c. Identify humans as both historical and current parts of the system
  2. Recognize and begin to evaluate the value, subjectivity and biases of quantitative data, to develop your level of confidence for using it to manage ecosystems for multiple goals, including economic, climate and biodiversity.
    a. Appraise how history, expert decision making and personal experience shape how you collect, interpret and apply quantitative evidence
    b. Understand uncertainty, including hidden uncertainties, when we apply, extrapolate and scale quantitative evidence

Yale-Myers MOD is led by Mark Bradford, Sparkle Malone and Luke Sanford