EES Gateway courses

EES has a long tradition of offering quality science education to non-majors. It is important that future citizens and leaders in business and society know something about science and the nature of scientific knowledge. We believe that natural resources like fossil fuels, water, and biodiversity, and issues related to the environment like energy or global change will be among the most pressing issues facing our lives in the future. In response, we have built our entire curriculum atop a gateway sequence that offers students modest-enrollment, topical classes that can help students find a rewarding way to meet science requirements or explore the possibility of an EES major or minor.

The College of Arts and Science requires its students to take a total of eight credits from the selection of courses designated as natural sciences. One of the courses must involve a laboratory. Our curriculum has been designed to help students meet these requirements with flexiblity.

Using EES courses to meet requirements

We offer 14 or more three-credit "gateway" courses below the 100 level, all of which are open to all students (except College Seminars, which are just for first-year students). In any semester you should find a lecture- and discussion-based course that meets an interest, in topics like the geology of war, volcanoes, ecology, natural hazards, energy, and much more.

In addition, we offer two one-credit courses that can be paired with any of the lecture courses to conveniently match up with College requirements. One course (EES 004) is a discussion course on environmental topics taught by gateway-course faculty (this is NOT a lab course!). The other course (EES 022) is a stand-alone laboratory that will get you outside and expose you to hands-on experience with a range of environmental systems and materials. EES 22 does fulfill the lab-science requirement.

NOTE: both EES 004 and EES 022 require that you take an EES gateway course as either a pre-requisite or a co-requisite.

So, to reiterate, to meet College of Arts and Sciences requirements, just choose two EES gateway courses, and take both EES 004 and EES 022. That will total to eight credits, one of which involves a lab.

Consider a minor: you're almost there!

Note also if you take all your science courses in EES, you will be pretty far towards a minor in EES as well, and you will have done the basics needed to start either our BS or BA majors. We have a pair of core courses in Earth systems and Earth history (EES 100 and 200) that can take you right out of the gateway sequence into the major, and we also have several 100-level courses that can be available to you once you've sampled our gateway sequence.