’80 Landscape Architect for Public Projects

The courses I remember best from my years in the STS program at Vassar are dialectic thinking, art history, geology, economics, and sociology. I spent my junior year at a different university where I was able to focus on my specialty, and then came back for my senior year to continue to develop the philosophical underpinnings that continue to shape and inspire me today.

I am currently working in landscape architecture for public projects and I am reminded daily of how the STS program reinforced my native intellectual curiosity by broadening the resources I could tap into and gave me the intellectual perspective that strengthened my commitment to work in the public realm. STS developed a philosophical foundation within me that allowed me to see that the world’s problems were complex and that following the tendrils of the sources of those complexities could be extremely intellectually rewarding and lead to technical solutions. I would also add that the STS program gave me a perspective on today’s current issues with climate change and the financial debacles that have unfolded.  In order to step forward and create the needed solutions, we need to tap into a disciplined foundation of thought, a vision well grounded in the past, and a critical understanding of the both past and present and what the future can be—all brainwork that STS can be part of.