Programme
The LDE Sustainability Honours Programme (15 EC) runs from November to June and consists of two courses: the Fundamentals and a Sustainability Challenge.
Part 1: LDE Sustainability Fundamentals (5 EC)
The goal of this course is to bring you and your classmates up to speed on key sustainability concepts and insights. You will attend interactive seminars from experts of all three universities, as well as from guest speakers from the field. Questions that will be addressed are for instance:
- What is ‘systems thinking’ and how can it be applied to social and environmental systems?
- What interventions can we do to make these systems more sustainable and just?
- How can we measure the impact of a policy or intervention?
This fundamental knowledge will prepare you for working on the practical part of the programme, the sustainability challenge. During the course, you will do assignments in small groups. This will acquaint you with your peers and with working in an interdisciplinary setting.
Part 2: LDE Sustainability Challenge (10 EC)
In the challenge, you will apply your newly acquired knowledge to a practical case. You will work in a small, interdisciplinary team of students (4-5) on a challenge from a real-world organisation from the public, private or civic sphere. Examples of possible challenges:
- Develop solutions to the housing crisis that simultaneously help cities meet their climate goals.
- Investigate policies to make sustainable technologies available to a broad spectrum of society.
- Create a plan to make an organisation's supply chain more circular.
Through the challenge you will develop vital skills for your future career:
- Design thinking: Learn to tackle a complex problem from scratch. Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test – and present your solution.
- Project management: Manage a long-term project for a real-world stakeholder.
- Interdisciplinary group work: Work with students from other backgrounds. Combine your perspectives in service of a common goal.
Prospectus
More details about the courses (schedule, skills, learning objectives) can be found in the prospectus.
Pass/fail system
The LDE Sustainability Honours Programme works with a pass/fail grading system. This means you get either a pass or a fail as the final ‘grade’ for each course.
The goal of a pass/fail system is to put the learning process at the heart of education. The system makes it easier for students to experiment beyond their comfort zone and use their creativity.
To stimulate this process, students have multiple assignments and feedback moments throughout the course. In contrast to having one final examination, pass/fail stimulates consistent learning and distributes the workload for students more evenly.
Practicalities
- When: November to June.
- Where: The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam
- Language: English
- Costs: No additional fees. However, you may incur travel costs.