On Tuesday, February 25th, from 3 to 7 pm in the McHugh lobby/room 102, join the Office of Sustainability and the Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills for the Green Careers: Engage & Explore (GCEE) event!

As an international leader in sustainability, UConn takes pride in pursuing excellence in environmental performance and consistently strives to be a center of learning for the next generation of environmental leaders. The GCEE event is an opportunity for students to see how their interests align with sustainability and environmental career paths. The event will kick off with an engagement fair featuring both employers with green career opportunities and student organizations – it is a chance for you as a student to speak with fellow passionate students and learn more about how you can get involved on campus, as well as learn about career opportunities in general, from various incredible companies in different career fields! (Note: resumes are not expected, nor will they be accepted.)

Following the engagement fair, an insightful discussion on the many green careers will be held during two, 45-minute panel events, along with an opportunity to network with our panelists. Past panelists have ranged from Pratt & Whitney engineers to leaders on the environmental justice front. Stay tuned for more information about the panelists!

Get ready for some career exploration and information through the Green Careers: Engage and Explore event on the 25th! Pre-registration is appreciated but not required: RSVP here!

 

Schedule:

Engagement Fair: 3-5pm, McHugh Lobby

Industry Panel: 5-5:45pm, McHugh 102

Networking Break (with pizza!): 5:45-6:15pm, McHugh Lobby

Alumni Panel: 6:15-7pm

 

Students of all majors are encouraged to attend. Green careers are not limited to environmental majors! We want to show you how so many majors can be related to a green career.

Why? The Earth is facing an imminent crisis: climate change. We will need all hands on deck to make progress in our goals as a global community to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save our planet. We at the OS want to show YOU, all the students here at UConn, that ‘green’ does not have to mean strictly environmental science. Our panelists include engineers, businesspeople, and more – sustainability initiatives can be incorporated into any job! There is a place for all of you in the fight for sustainability and environmental justice; you all have a role to play, big or small.

Environmental Leadership Awards: 2023 to 2024

The UConn Office of Sustainability is requesting nominations for Environmental Leadership Awards (ELAs).

The ELAs are a means of recognizing individuals or groups who have worked alone or as part of organizations to support sustainability efforts at UConn or beyond. Nominations can be submitted by faculty members, staff members, students, or external partners, and are evaluated by a committee appointed by the Office of Sustainability and Institute of the Environment.

The period of activity that forms the basis of nominations must be restricted to 2023 to 2024

Nominations must meet at least one of seven criteria areas:

1. Performance
2. Responsible Management and Growth
3. Outreach
4. Academics
5. Conservation
6. Teamwork
7. Environmental Justice

More information about these criteria can be found on our ELA webpage.

Recipients of the ELAs are honored at an award ceremony commemorating their achievement on Tuesday, April 22.

Submit A Nomination Form

Deadline: February 28 at 11:59 PM

If you know a champion for the environment, recognize their efforts! Accepting nominations for:

• Undergrad
• Grad
• Faculty
• Staff
• External Partners
• UConn groups/teams/organizations

UConn was recognized as the 10th most sustainable university in the world according to UI GreenMetric, an international system that reviews 1,477 global universities in 95 countries for sustainability performance. This is the fourth year in a row that UConn has made their top ten list. 

Read the full story on UConn Today.

As a law student, I was very excited to witness the bureaucracy of global governance firsthand at the COP. I did not really know what to expect. I have read about these conferences since I was in high school; I have studied the Paris Agreement and researched its impact; and, as a climate activist, I have always been intrigued by the international legal dimensions of the issue. To travel halfway across the world and see everything, in full form, felt incredibly surreal. At no other time in human history have delegates from every country in the world sat around a table and developed universal treaties together. And yet, while this is emblematically the height of global, liberal democracy, the context surrounding it could not have been more disquieting. The United States just elected a President that attempted to violently overthrow the nation’s last election; committed to imprisoning his opponents and killing asylum seekers, calling them animals, thieves, and criminals; and openly vowed to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry for a billion-dollar bribe. More bombs have been used to kill Palestinians in Gaza than were dropped in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. The war in Ukraine is still being waged. And natural disasters, droughts, heat waves, and famines are destroying communities and taking people’s lives at record levels every successive year.

I knew going in that COP was not the solution to any of that. But it is difficult to see everything progress as normal when these challenges really demand so much more. The most important thing I took away from the conference this year is that a new political alignment is necessary. There is an incredible dissonance you feel walking through the halls of the conference, but for anyone who gets the opportunity to attend a future COP the one thing that you will notice is just how many people are there with you. There are thousands of young people, thousands of experts and activists and scientists. The will and the energy are not lost. The institutions, as they currently exist, might be. COP might be a solution in the future, it might not be. But the impetus for trying that system was important. It still resonates. Millions of people are organized and demanding something different and the conference is just one location where solidarity within that movement can be felt and formed.

When you participate in this program, your role as an active force in history begins. Everything you see that is unjust or too slow or too ineffective or too captured: that is your project. Even if you fear that the institutions tasked with solving a problem are ineffective, it is always important to recognize where power is, how it is being used, and to develop theories to wield it more effectively. One of the most impactful tools of the legal profession is the power to decide what is legitimate and what is not. That can be weaponized, or it can be used earnestly to protect people, but the worst thing we can do is ignore it because it is failing at the latter. COP itself is a legal institution with the power to legitimize a path forward. And everywhere you see unity; people fighting for what is just, in spite of violent opposition; defending one another; and traveling thousands of miles to make their voices heard, that is where you build the resilience to take on those fights. That is how we create a politics for a more impactful, just, and democratic international governance. The will to create that is there and I am so grateful for the experience of attending COP because it gave me the opportunity to bear witness to all of that. More clearly now than ever, I know where I need to put my energy.

Colin Rosadino is a law student at the UConn School of Law.