MSES - Program Overview
Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Energy and Sustainability (MSES) prepares students for public and private sector leadership roles in energy and sustainability – fields undergoing rapid technological, economic, and regulatory disruption. MSES combines a comprehensive core curriculum with a specialization track, allowing personalization for each student while maintaining a cohort experience. Focused, interdisciplinary curriculum provides critical professional training while limiting time out of the workforce, and facilitates student experience with industry partners and practitioners.
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Why Earn an MSES Degree?
Implementation of climate and energy solutions requires a new generation of leaders who can navigate the complex intersection of technology, economics, and public policy for energy and sustainability. Organizations increasingly recognize the materiality of these issues across their business lines and are investing in solutions and personnel. Job prospects are particularly bright – the marketplace accounts for nearly 7% of the US workforce, and is anticipated to grow at a pace well beyond the national average.
- Fast and Focused – Full-time, ten-month Master’s degree program provides strong professional training to deliver energy and sustainability solutions, while minimizing time out of the workforce.
- Important and Interdisciplinary – Empowering students to advance careers as leaders in one of the most important and fastest-growing global industries: energy and sustainability. By leveraging the full span of interdisciplinary expertise across the University’s schools and programs, graduates will be well-equipped to navigate the complex intersections of technology, finance, and public policy impacting the market today.
- Professional – Organizations are hungry for professionals who can bring skillsets across competency areas. Hands-on student exposure to industry practitioners through the MSES faculty body, field visits, and a capstone consulting project creates a powerful professional network for graduates.
Program Goals and Areas of Focus
Each MSES student undertakes a prescribed core curriculum that applies academic rigor across technology, economics, and regulation/policy related to the energy and sustainability landscape:
- Economics – Establish a strong fundamental knowledge base about the value chain surrounding critical resources such as power, gas, water, food, and transportation. Understand how value is created and destroyed and ensure a baseline view of key decision makers and stakeholders in the value chain.
- Technology – Prepare students with the foundational understanding of core hardware, software, and associated processes that allow for the creation / management of critical resources. Concepts such as electric grid operations, transportation systems basics, water treatment technology, and food value chain technologies would be amongst the topics covered. Students will not become expert in any single topic but they will have the tools to work with and communicate about resource management technology.
- Public Policy – Given the prominent role of policy in management of critical infrastructure resources like power, water, transportation, food, and gas, it is vital to any leaders’ success to understand how regulatory decisions are influenced, made, and changed. The power sector alone has more than 100 bodies that regulate its operation. MSES students should complete the Program with the knowledge of the major regulatory bodies that oversee each resource market and an understanding of how they work and what challenges they face.
Curriculum
The strength of the MSES Program is its interdisciplinary approach, combining a prescribed core curriculum in technology, economics, and public policy with a student-selected specialization matching their career objectives. The nine-credit core and three-credit specialization provide critical professional training while limiting time out of the workforce, and offer hands-on exposure to industry partners and practitioners throughout the program. The curriculum is complemented by the practical application of energy and sustainability education through field visits and a capstone spring practicum project.
Specializations
Each MSES student will select one of the following three specialization options at the outset of Fall quarter. Each specialization has a unique set of elective courses that can be applied towards the completion of a student’s degree:
- Energy and Sustainable Finance
- Energy Technology
- Sustainability
Courses
Below is a sampling of just some of the courses that are offered through the MSES Program.
- ISEN 401: History and Politics of Resource Innovation: Development of primary energy sources throughout US history and consider the impact of current political and economic decisions around energy on the development of domestic infrastructure and institutions in the near future.
- ISEN 402: Fundamentals of Natural Resources Distribution: Covers the engineering fundamentals of natural resource distribution systems, spanning both energy (electricity, hydrocarbon fuels) and water.
- ISEN 403: Energy, Water and Transportation System Economics: Underlying economic theory driving core resource markets - including electricity, gas, water, and transportation. Includes a discussion of issues that are unique to energy generation and environmental impact, as well as a deep dive by resource type.
- ISEN 404: Resource Markets Design and Regulation: Evolution of the natural resource markets in the United States through the lens of the regulatory and quasi-governing agencies that have shaped their structure. Focuses on electric power markets, but will compare these market structures with those that govern water and other relevant systems. Students will also study current state and federal policy innovation creating or slowing current market reform.
- ISEN 405: Corporate Sustainability and Value Creation: Emerging market for leveraging sustainability to drive value (reduced risk / increased innovation) in the corporate environment, including a primer on leading standards and sustainability reporting.
- ISEN 412: Global Energy Markets and Sustainability: Provides an overview of global energy markets and will highlight differences vs. the US from an economic and a regulatory standpoint. Explores a breadth of issues ranging from the impact of international accords to the methods of market-based regulation of non-renewable fuels.
- ISEN 414: Innovation in Energy and Sustainability: Special seminar provides a fresh perspective on the biggest innovations today and on the near horizon in energy and sustainability markets.
- ISEN 421: Scaling Sustainable Technology: Introduces concrete strategies that can be employed in taking new sustainable offerings to scale in the development life cycle. Focus is on expanding test products into larger volume market deployment strategies, modes of financing, testing, and future-proofing.
- ISEN 422: Electrify Everything: Beneficial Electrification, EVs, and Beyond: Introduces the concept of beneficial electrification as a tool to dramatically increase grid flexibility, reduce total household and business energy costs, and reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Explores emerging state of electricity consumption and review how it relates to changing transportation markets.
- ISEN 440: Private Energy and Sustainable Infrastructure Development and Finance: Design, permitting, financing, and implementation process of large-scale energy infrastructure developments, including natural gas plants, solar and wind farms, hydro, and electric storage.
- ISEN 462: Sustainable Supply Chain: Basic principles of supply chain management, evolving trends in sustainable supply chain, and the practical realities of driving sustainable practices into the supply chain operations.
- ISEN 463: Circular Economy: Use systems thinking to understand the technological, economic and policy implications of circular economies. Focus on real-world applications, testing the feasibility of circular systems and analyzing their design.
- ISEN 470: Sustainability in Water and Wastewater: Provides an introduction to the economics, technology and regulation that drive water and wastewater markets. Survey of the major issues that exist and a discussion of opportunities to drive to more sustainable water systems.
- ISEN 471: Sustainable Food: Main sustainability topics related to the production, transportation, processing and consumption of food. Focus on tangible methods to promote sustainability in the food industry such as regenerative agriculture techniques, reducing GHG emissions throughout the supply chain and reduced food waste.
- ISEN 472: Climate Activism and its Business Impacts: Offers an overview of climate activism and its business impacts over time. Analyzes the way in which consumer behavior and corporate policy are affected by activism.
- ISEN 498: Energy and Sustainability Project Practicum: 10-week, team-based consulting project for a corporate, non-profit or government partner of Northwestern University. Student teams will be advised by the instructor but will work directly with the client organization. There will be limited traditional reading / lecture content and the topics covered will include project management and team collaboration.
Who should Apply?
MSES is designed for students seeking a career as a leader or a manager in an organization (civic, not-/for-profit, regulatory) within the energy and/or sustainability fields.
Applicants should have (at least) a bachelor’s degree in engineering, natural sciences, or other quantitative or topic-relevant areas including economics, math/statistics or political science.
Ideal applicants will be early/mid-career or have graduated with distinction in their field of study and have a demonstrable commitment to energy and sustainability through academic achievements, volunteer or summer work experience, student research and leadership activities, or other comparable experiences.
PLEASE NOTE: The program is not accepting international applicants for the 2020-21 academic year but will do so in future cohorts.