Grace Whipkey
BS 2020 Decision Science, Environmental & Sustainability Studies Minor
Grace Whipkey began her undergraduate career at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with prior interest in environmental issues and thought the minor would be a great way to incorporate that interest into her studies. The interdisciplinary nature of the minor allowed her to more easily intertwine it with her main area of study, decision science. Though decision science may not typically be thought of as being connected to environmental issues, being able to choose from a wide variety of classes for the minor allowed her to fit the two fields of study in a way that would not only be interesting to her but also support her overall degree.
Whipkey’s favorite part of the program was the capstone project. As an independent research project, the environmental and sustainability studies capstone gives students a lot of freedom to explore questions that are interesting to them. Whipkey appreciated the amount of flexibility she had in choosing her research question and was even able to find a new area of interest: environmental decision-making. For the capstone, she decided to look into the often weak relationship between environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behavior to see if popular measures of knowledge were incomplete. She found that researchers often do not measure environmental knowledge holistically, especially social knowledge, and asserts that this gap is detrimental to properly understanding people’s environmental behaviors. In her paper, she advises “that it is necessary to conduct a study that analyzes the effects of all types of environmental knowledge alongside social knowledge,” and proposes “an experiment that will expose both the relationship between each type of environmental knowledge and behavior and the effectiveness of attempts to increase each type of knowledge in promoting pro-environmental behavior.”¹ The project gave her the unique ability to explore the intersection between her major, decision science, and her minor, environmental and sustainability studies. You can read more about Whipkey’s capstone project here.
Whipkey is currently pursuing her masters of science in Behavior, Education, & Communication and Environmental Justice at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). Her Behavior, Education, and Communication concentration builds off of her undergraduate studies and explores “the causes, dynamics, and consequences of decisions and actions that impact natural resources and the environment,”² and her Environmental Justice concentration, a renowned program in the field, continues to add interdisciplinarity to Whipkey’s studies by investigating “historical and contemporary factors that shape the emergence of environmental justice movements around the world” and “the causes and consequences of inequitable distributions of environmental benefits and hazards.”³ Whipkey credits the capstone she did as part of the environmental and sustainability studies minor, along with lots of encouragement from the program director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program, Professor Abigail Owen, as the reasons she decided to continue her education in these fields.
¹ Grace Whipkey, “Examining the Impact of Holistic Environmental Knowledge on Behavior,” 2020.
² “Behavior, Education, and Communication,” School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, https://seas.umich.edu/academics/master-science/behavior-education-and-communication.
³ “Environmental Justice,” School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, https://seas.umich.edu/academics/master-science/environmental-justice.