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What kind of classes are going to go into your major? My undergraduate degree was in Computer Engineering — and the systems analysis and EE/CompSci fundamentals I learned are as much of an influence to me as the concepts of bio-mimicry and and permaculture. IMHO a good book to pick up is Doppelt’s “Leading Change Toward Sustainability."

I was able to take two “sustainability" focused classes at Auburn and worked for our campus sustainability office. The first class was more of a survey of the field — and even though I’d already learned a lot of the material through independent study I found the class discussions valuable.

The second class was in the education department and open to all graduate students. We used Doppelt’s book, but my classmates were all relatively new to concepts like the triple-bottom-line — which made the class pretty boring.

If I had to go back I would try to take more physics and math classes. In my opinion college is for making yourself learning something you could never learn on your own — for me that was stuff like multi-variable calculus and systems analysis (Fourier, differential equations, etc.). I managed to learn a little on numerical analysis and neural networks — but I’d like to know more about support vector machines and other new machine learning paradigms.

Nature works on systems that assemble from the bottom up and provides resilience through numerous interfaces and exchanges. There is no waste in nature; everything has value as an input to another system. 

You can choose to approach your design problems from the very bottom up — or you can elect to be more of a systems integrator; looking from the top-down; finding trends, following flows, etc. Ideally your holistic point-of-view will eventually allow you to do both.