Masters of Environmental Management/Masters of Forestry

[standby_go]

So, I got notice today that I have received conditional acceptance into Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment for their dual degree MEM/MF program. It's conditional because they want me to take a statistics course, a calculus course, and a microeconomics course before I enroll (I can take one of these my first semester). My question for those

Comments

[elf]

I'm with Darcy - don't bother with calc. I'd take the undergrad econ course though - it helps to have the basics under your belt before you start trying to do more advanced stuff. (Disclaimer: I minored in econ in undergrad, and having the basics down makes the grad level stuff FAR more interesting/useful. Don't stop with the required course - you should definitely take econ courses in grad school too that are tailored more to your specialty).

Stats is just a useful life skill to have - but having taken stat every year at tj, and in undergrad, and then in grad school I really didn't get too much more out of any particular level. I think you'll be fine just taking the stats course at Duke your first semester.

Econ and stat are just useful to have under you belt; I don't use any of the three disciplines often in my job - but then, I'm a policy wonk, and spend more time on the international cooperation side of things than anything else. HOWEVER, I *have* found that having a good understanding of how people manipulate stats/data has been useful - but that's only because I have a really crappy Secretariat to deal with, and occasionally need to either call shenanigans on a study or quote, or at least have a well enough developed spidey-sense to know when to refer it to my scientists for further review.