Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Heather Williams

Reader 2

Char Miller

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Abstract

For our final Capstone group project, my group and I had the privilege of designing a standalone Environmental Analysis major for Scripps College. Scripps College has been in need of stronger support for Environmental Analysis (EA) for many years. EA consistently ranks as one of the top majors for Scripps students (it’s been one of the top five majors for the past five years), and yet Scripps students wanting to major in Environmental Analysis have to do so through Pomona or Pitzer Colleges, meaning that they end up taking the majority of their classes at Pomona and Pitzer and seek advising from professors at these schools, who already have heavy advisee loads due to the popularity of the EA major.

Our group’s task was to envision a Scripps-specific EA major that could be implemented within the next 5-10 years. By interviewing current students, alums, and faculty, we collected data on the Scripps community’s unique visions for EA, as well as challenges in its current iteration and how to avoid these when EA at Scripps is established. We coded these interviews to organize the feedback we received and then transferred that feedback into tangible suggestions. We also conducted research on comparable environmental studies/humanities programs at other liberal arts institutions around the U.S. to get a sense for the components that other successful programs have implemented and get inspiration for envisioning our EA program beyond what has already been in play at the 5Cs through Pomona and Pitzer. Our research culminated in the proposal of two options: the gold and silver options, corresponding with different funding capacities that Scripps might have in the next few years. In the proposal of our final options, we balanced the need for Scripps to establish a tangible EA program quickly and the need for Scripps to serve its EA majors in the most expansive way possible.

Our project’s identity as a student-led initiative in the academic realm of an institution like the Claremont Colleges was not something we took lightly. We appreciated the unique opportunity we had to design a program for future generations of students and made sure to center their voices in every stage of our project.

In this reflection, I will contextualize the problem we were asked to address, outline our objectives, go into depth on my individual contributions, analyze some of the feedback we received and show how this highlights the broader institutional changes needed for EA to thrive at Scripps, reflect on our proposed options and the impacts they would have on Scripps, as well as propose some future directions for research in this realm.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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