The USC Sustainability Center’s Sustainability Course Finder aims to help students choose courses that relate to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations as a part of the school’s push for a more “green” campus environment.
The 17 goals include ending hunger and food insecurity while promoting nutrition and sustainable agriculture, ensuring equitable access to clean and affordable energy and promoting sustainable usage of natural resources to preserve animal life. This list of actions the U.N. says must be taken simultaneously to end “poverty and other deprivations,” tackle climate change and foster equity.
The website allows students to filter courses by a specific SDG or find a course that “maps” SDGs. If a course’s content features more than one SDG by entering the course ID, the hope is that students can choose courses that align with their sustainability interests. The program was launched late this spring, but this fall is the first time many students will be able to use it during the course registration period.
Students can focus their studies on “particular sustainability goals, and faculty can identify ways to incorporate sustainability into their classes,” according to the Sustainability Course Finder website.
Each USC course was examined by a team of faculty and student researchers, including USC students Brian Tinsley and Alison Chen and environmental studies lecturer Dr. Julie Hopper, to see if the topics covered included SDGs by matching terms in course descriptions to over 4,250 keywords, according to the Sustainability Course Finder’s website.
“This was never just a résumé builder— it’s about raising sustainability awareness in higher education,” Tinsley told USC News back in May. The project was inspired by Peter Wu, a student at Carnegie Mellon who wrote similar code for the courses at his school.
According to the program’s website, 61% of USC courses are SDG-related, with 3.1% of USC courses being specifically sustainability-focused. The data includes all courses except for directed research, master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation courses. Additionally, the website shows the percentage of courses in each individual school that were related to the SDGs; The Leventhal School of Accounting is the only school whose courses are all SDG-related.
“I’ve always found it tricky to pick out courses relating to sustainability when not all of them begin with the ‘ENST’ prefix,” junior environmental studies major Emma Rohrer said. “The filter lets me explore a ton of courses that are relevant to my interests, without having to go through all of [Web Registration] to find them. The keywords are really helpful to get into the specifics of each class — there’s so much more out there than I thought.”
While the course finder will help climate-focused students with selecting their classes, other students say they do not consider sustainability during registration.
“I don’t care about [sustainability in the classroom] enough for it to affect what classes I take,” junior health and human sciences major Jentrie Gordy said.
The website emphasizes that the team behind the project encourages feedback from students and professors to improve accuracy. Students who wish to determine if their upcoming courses discuss the SDGs or want to tailor their schedule accordingly can access the website here and follow the relevant prompts.