By Sarah Howard, Student in the Master of Science in Sustainability Science Program, Columbia University School of Professional Studies
Over the past year in Columbia University’s Master of Science in Sustainability Science program, I have had the opportunity to participate in four field courses, both at home and abroad. Each is the kind of class that makes you stop thinking about conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, and sustainability as distant concepts and instead brings you into direct engagement with them as real places, alongside the people and ecosystems most affected. These experiences challenged me academically, pushed me outside my comfort zone, and fundamentally changed the way I think about scientific inquiry and my own future in the field.
Tropical Coastal Ecosystems: Little Cayman, The Cayman Islands
Based at the Central Caribbean Marine Institute on Little Cayman, my first field course, Sustainability and Resilience of Tropical Coastal Ecosystems, taught by William Precht, focused on the ecological relationships between coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests, and the conservation challenges these systems face due to climate change, invasive species, tourism, and coastal development.
Before the course, I had never snorkeled. By the end of the trip, I was nose-to-nose with a nurse shark in the open waters at night. We conducted transect and quadrat sampling in the seagrass beds, moved through dense mangrove root systems, and documented the reef’s remarkable biodiversity — including Nassau grouper, a conservation success story in the Cayman Islands, where protections have helped rebuild a population once devastated by overfishing.
But we saw the challenges, too. Invasive lionfish hovered among the reefs, sargassum spread unchecked across the water’s surface, and bleached coral skeletons littered the seafloor. Seeing these challenges is part of what made this course so compelling: reading about coastal ecosystem decline in a paper is fundamentally different from watching those problems unfold in real time while floating above the reef.
View from dive boat on the way to a snorkeling site
Tropical Highland Ecosystems: Vietnam
Partnering with the Southern Institute of Ecology, the next course, Sustainability and Resilience of Tropical Highland Ecosystems, taught by Brendan Buckley, focused on biodiversity, restoration ecology, and community engagement within UNESCO biosphere reserves in Vietnam. We worked in long-term forest monitoring plots in two national parks, measuring tree diameters and heights, documenting tree health, and collecting census data to monitor ecological change. Back in the classroom, we used RStudio to map species distributions, calculate biodiversity indices, model relationships, estimate carbon stocks, and translate those estimates into carbon credit frameworks.
Equally important was direct engagement with indigenous communities and local stakeholders. We conducted interviews focused on climate change, livelihoods, and relationships to the forest with people living these realities every day. They offered us the kind of knowledge you simply cannot get from textbooks or academic papers.
This experience fundamentally changed how I think about sustainability implementation. In sustainability conversations, there is often an assumption that new technologies alone can solve environmental problems. Seeing sustainability challenges on the ground complicated that perspective in productive ways. When you observe how conservation policy intersects with local economies, governance systems, and historical context, you begin to understand that these so-called “barriers” are not inconvenient footnotes to the environmental work you want to do — they are the work.
Howard using an increment borer to take a tree core sample.
Wildlife Monitoring: Upstate New York
Closer to home, Field Methods in Wildlife Monitoring, taught by Wai-Ming Wong, brought me to Columbia County in upstate New York, where we deployed camera traps on land to monitor carnivore presence and movement. Across the study period, our cameras captured bobcats, black bears, coyotes, foxes, and numerous smaller species. We then evaluated how site placement, habitat characteristics, and technical issues influenced our ecological inferences. Our work highlighted the logistical realities of wildlife monitoring, from species identification challenges in infrared imagery to troubleshooting false triggers, and from animal interference with equipment to the importance of thoughtful study design in generating meaningful conservation data. The course demonstrated that wildlife monitoring extends far beyond collecting images of animals; it requires designing scientifically rigorous studies capable of informing conservation policy, land-use planning, and human–wildlife conflict mitigation.
A bobcat walks past a wildlife camera trap deployed by Howard along a grassy trail in upstate New York.
Ichthyology: New York City
Most recently, the course Ichthyology, taught by Pedro Bragança, demonstrated that applied ecological learning can happen even in the middle of New York City. Split between Columbia’s campus and the American Museum of Natural History, the course explored fish evolution, anatomy, morphology, taxonomy, and conservation through direct engagement with the museum’s preserved specimen collections, including a coelacanth and a Greenland shark — species very few people can claim to have handled firsthand.
Working directly with the collections made concepts like phylogeny, adaptation, and speciation more tangible than they had ever felt in a textbook. It also reinforced the continuing importance of natural history museums to biological research and conservation science. In an era increasingly shaped by computational tools and large datasets, it was fascinating to see how much observational skill and taxonomic expertise still matter, and, moreover, how much about our natural world remains unknown. There is still much work to be done, and I am excited to be part of it.
Howard holds a small preserved shark specimen with an intact embryonic yolk sac in a laboratory setting.
Reflections
What made these experiences so impactful was seeing how field measurements connect to larger sustainability questions. In each class, I learned how ecological fieldwork is integral to broader conversations about climate resilience, biodiversity conservation, and sustainability policy. For much of my academic career, I’ve worked with scientific data by analyzing and interpreting results, but these courses gave me a much deeper understanding of how ecological data are actually collected in the field and all the logistical challenges, sampling limitations, and methodological decisions that shape those data long before they reach the analysis stage. It has made me a more discerning scientist and reinforced how deeply research outcomes depend on the quality of the data, the metrics selected, and the careful study design behind it all.
Sustainability is an incredibly broad field, and there are countless ways to apply sustainability training across industries and sectors. But seeing researchers, conservation practitioners, and scientific professionals in their respective elements made it much easier to visualize what my own future in this field could look like, with each experience offering tangible examples of the day-to-day work on the ground. I could see myself following in the footsteps of any of these inspiring professionals, and it made me realize how many doors are truly open to me once I finish my studies.
Field-based learning changes not only what you know, but how you understand the world and your place in it. It forces you to engage with complexity in real time, to adapt, to collaborate, and to think beyond theory alone. And in a field with problems as multifaceted and interdisciplinary as sustainability science, that kind of learning is invaluable.
Howard snorkeling above a seagrass bed of turtle grass and a dome-shaped Siderastrea siderea coral.
Exposed prop roots of red mangroves
Howard uses a DBH (Diameter at Breast Height) tape to measure the diameter of a tree in a dense tropical forest in Vietnam.
Howard stands among rocky coastal outcrops overlooking the ocean along the Southern Vietnam coast.
Howard records ecological observations in a notebook while standing in a tropical forest monitoring plot.
Howard secures a wildlife camera trap to a tree during fieldwork in a forested area in upstate New York. Alt
A wildlife camera trap deployed by Howard.
Preserved fish specimens stored in glass jars inside a scientific collections laboratory at the American Museum of Natural History.
A small section of the American Museum of Natural History Ichthyology Collection
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Science program, offered by the Office of Environmental Professional Programs in the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School, prepares students for management and leadership positions in which they help organizations address environmental impacts. Students learn strategies to respond to the ever-changing environment and predict future environmental changes—and the impact on corporations, not-for-profits, and the public.
Designed by Research Faculty at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in collaboration with Columbia’s Earth Institute, the program develops a new generation of scientific leaders through a cutting-edge curriculum led by the world’s top sustainability scientists, the majority of whom are Lamont Research Professors. Graduates are well prepared for management and leadership positions, armed with the scientific expertise to drive meaningful environmental change and lead organizations in a rapidly evolving sustainability landscape. With the flexibility to choose from a variety of courses, students can tailor their education to career goals, while New York City serves as a living laboratory for sustainability innovations and connects them with employers actively seeking program graduates.
Learn more about the program here.
