Overview

Faculty

Major

Opportunities & Facilities

News and Developments

Job Listings

Contact Us

 

Opportunities and Facilities

Environmental Studies may get its mail at Wheaton College in Illinois, but your work with us can take you across the country and around the world. Wheaton College features its own Wheaton College Science Station at the edge of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. Here, within an hour's drive of the incredible natural laboratories of Badlands National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Buffalo Gap National Grassland, and Custer State Park, students study a range of environmental subjects in exciting and challenging field environments. At the science station, students may enroll in courses in botany, ecology, zoology, geology, and other areas of environmental study, all taught in a dynamic field environment.

As a participating college of the Au Sable Institute, Wheaton students can take courses at any of Au Sable's four campuses worldwide (Michigan, Washington, Kenya, or India) as Wheaton credits, and are eligible for grants, scholarships, fellowships, and other forms of aid. Au Sable is a uniquely, intentionally and explicitly Christian field institute in environmental studies founded on the biblical mandate to care for God's creation. As students at Au Sable, students not only experience exciting classes, course assignments and field work in environmental studies, but become part of a Christian community of scientists, teachers, and resource professionals dedicated to expressing Christian faith, witness, service through acts of environmental stewardship.

The Human Needs and Global Resources program at Wheaton College places students in internships in developing nations throughout the world. Here students live with and among local people, experiencing day to day life in the developing world firsthand as they endeavor to solve some of life's most basic environmental problems like providing clean drinking water, establishing sustainable agriculture, removing environmental hazards that cause disease transmission, or preserving nature reserves and individual species important to local peoples and cultures.

Compass plant flowering on restored prairie at the Morton Arboretum near Chicago.

The Greater Chicago Area is rich in opportunities for environmental service and study. Within an hour of Wheaton's campus are such resources as world class Lincoln Park and Brookfield Zoos, the Shedd Aquarium, the Morton Arboretum, and the extensive Cook and DuPage County Forest Preserve system. Chicago's extensive and diverse urban environments also provide opportunity to study the sociological dimensions of environmental issues in urban settings. These facilities and settings, and many others, provide close, firsthand opportunity for study, research, and service to students who are citizens of the Wheaton Environmental Studies Program.