A university degree program may blaze new trails for aspiring wildlife and environmental managers.
Students can enrol this fall in the University of Saskatchewan’s four year renewable resource management program offered through the agriculture department. Within a few years, natural resources technology diploma graduates from the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology will be able to enter the university program at Year 3 to complete the degree in two years.
Hamilton Greenwood, head of the natural resources technology department at SIAST’s Prince Albert campus, said the two programs are a good fit, providing training for jobs such as landscape and forestry management, national parks and mines.
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“What the university has provided is the ability to allow students to continue their education and move down a different stream and get more of the theory and a greater ability to manage natural resources,” he said.
“A technical program goes so far and a university degree can go further.”
Greenwood said these programs create graduates better able to deal with the management of more than one species or element .
SIAST students graduate with hands-on skills and readily find work in often seasonal entry level positions, he added.
Greenwood said the addition of a degree can vault them into year-round jobs in management.
The SIAST program has created similar joint programs with the University of Regina and the First Nations University but this is the first time it has collaborated with the U of S.
“Here we have a recognition of the strength of college education,” Greenwood said.
Dan Pennock, the university’s associate dean of agriculture who has helped guide the program’s development, hopes it will see about 40 students enrolled this fall and graduate about 50 students a year when fully operational.
The new program will use teaching staff from the agriculture college and add one new position.
The goal of developing new programs is to attract new kinds of students who wouldn’t typically be drawn to production agriculture courses, Pennock said.
The renewable resource management program is the only degree of its kind offered in Western Canada, Pennock said, and graduates will work in environmental remediation and reclamation, resource management and First Nations land management, which is a growing area.
