2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Climate change is widely acknowledged to be one of the defining engineering challenges of our time. While many individual lessons and even semester-long courses related to energy and sustainability are available, there are relatively few technical degree programs in this area, and no published best practices on establishing such a program.

In this work, we report on the construction and enactment of a new master’s degree program in energy and sustainability engineering housed within the chemical engineering department at a research-focused university in the United States. First, we summarize our preliminary research on existing technical undergraduate minors and majors, professional and PhD degree programs, and graduate certificates in the area of energy and sustainability at peer institutions. We also describe the curriculum of our newly-developed program. We offer this background information as a resource to assist leaders at peer institutions in the development of similar offerings.

Second, we use autoethnographic methods to describe the process of creating the program, from initial ideation to curriculum development to final program approval. Based on field notes from student focus groups, faculty committee meetings, department faculty meetings, and meetings with upper administration, we use the launch of this program as a window into the activity systems governing university decision-making. Different actors within these systems acted according to different goals. For example, even decisions about the name of the program prompted extensive discussion, with students preferring straightforward degree titles that they felt would most effectively communicate their skills to employers, while faculty and administrators advocated for more distinctive titles that they felt would stand out in a competitive academic landscape. Administrators, who were also faculty, balanced goals of student learning with goals of maximizing marketability, which in turn led to tensions with intra-university political concerns regarding domain overlap and potential perceived competition for prospective students. The timeline and presentation of this program was also significantly impacted by shifting political and funding landscapes, which led some administrators to argue for the removal of “sustainability” from the program title while also prompting an increased focus on the growing the master’s student population as a means of ensuring financial viability.

This paper offers a roadmap for leaders working towards new degree program offerings in energy and sustainability, and simultaneously uses the launch of the authors’ new master’s program as a lens into more generalizable student, faculty, and administrative activity systems that impact the pursuit of a broad range of organizational change initiatives.