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School for Cross-faculty Studies Global Sustainable Development

Why I chose the GSD MASc - Karolina's Story

Our innovative MASc in Global Sustainable Development offers a unique opportunity to join a community of transdisciplinary experts and practitioners with a passion for research and teaching. We spoke to one of our current students Karolina, to understand why she pursued postgraduate study and find out more about her experiences of the course.

Before postgraduate study

I was in the process of completing my BSc in Management at Warwick Business School when I decided to pursue a MASc in Global Sustainable Development. I have always been interested in issues of sustainability, especially after completing an internship in Poland at a small environmental start-up who were developing a carbon footprint measurement tool.

I was immediately drawn to how the GSD MASc course was structured, the broad range of topics it covered and how it didn’t push you towards a specific career or research path. Moreover, I decided that combining my business background with a sustainability-related degree would set a good foundation for my future career goals of working in sustainability consulting or logistics.

My experiences of the course so far

I have enjoyed most of the modules that the course offers, however I found Global Challenges and Transdisciplinary Response particularly useful as someone who didn’t take GSD as an undergraduate, as it provided a strong introduction to sustainability issues and their technological and social limitations. The module also featured different speakers for each topic, which made each seminar very interesting as each industry professional or academic offered their unique knowledge and differing perspectives.

My experiences of the teaching faculty have also been very positive. The lecturers openly advertise their office hours, which are useful as we know when we can pop in and ask a question or for support with something. They are also very responsive to student feedback and work hard to ensure that the lectures are as engaging as possible for us.

Skills and knowledge I have gained

My knowledge and sustainability issues have grown exponentially since undertaking this course, and I have also become a much faster reader due to all the academic articles we have to read! I found the Quantitative Approaches to Sustainable Development module useful for developing my quantitative research skills, and appreciate how the flexibility over our assignment topics and overall structure of the degree allows me to apply things I have learnt from various modules to other classwork.

My next steps

I am currently starting work on my Capstone project, which is an essential piece of work for completing the GSD MASc course. I will be undertaking a research dissertation on ‘green bonds’, which are a type of fixed-income instrument for businesses that are specifically designed to raise money for climate and environmental projects. I will be exploring whether these green bonds actually achieve what they are supposed to do or whether they are simply another corporate greenwashing tool.

Learn more about Warwick International Intensive Study Programme (WIISP) here.

Learn more about Warwick Innovation Fund (also students can apply!) here.