Become an innovative environmental leader.
Build upon your experience and excel at effective environmental leadership.
The challenges facing us require resource managers who can bring diverse stakeholders together to solve complex environmental challenges. Communities, organizations, and decision-makers need guidance and facilitation on how best to prepare for climate change, ensure water and food security, and approach, energy, and materials management sustainably. Our graduates lead vital environmental efforts to protect natural resources in sustainable ways, preserve ecological services in the face of landscape development, create landscape resilience, develop multiple sustainable uses of a natural resource, and restore degraded ecosystems.
This degree is offered by AU New England.
Program Overview
This 30-credit program gives students the flexibility to earn a master’s degree while continuing to work full-time. Students develop leadership skills to address multi-issue, multi-stakeholder environmental problems and learn how to manage complex natural resource issues.
RMA students learn how to build stakeholder capacity, practice effective communication strategies, and provide the leadership and management to organizations and communities facing a myriad of challenges due to difficult resource management decisions, especially within the context of a changing climate.
RMA faculty are engaged environmental scholars and practitioners who address real-world environmental problems at regional, national, and international scales. Our active applied research projects will provide you with a wide range of networking opportunities. Our cohorts reflect a diversity of cooperatively oriented learners ranging from seasoned resource managers to more recent undergraduates trained with cutting edge management tools.
Degree Requirements
Master of Science in Resource Management & Administration (30 credits)
RMA Concentration Requirements
- Building Sustainable Organizations
- Climate Change Resilience, Adaptation and Mitigation
- Earth Systems and Climate Change
- Energy and Materials Sustainability
- Financial Administration
- Leadership for Change
- Political Economy and Sustainability
- Principles of Sustainability
- Proposal Writing and Project Management
Capstone Project
- Master’s Project/Thesis
- Collaborative Service Initiative OR
- Professional internship
The core curriculum classes meet four weekends in the fall and spring semesters, with a 5-day intensive at the beginning of the fall terms.
- Two (2) 5-day intensives in early fall semester (6 credits)
- Four (4) weekends each fall and spring semesters (21 credits)
- Internship and Capstone Project (3 credits)
- Choice of additional weekly courses (6 credits of additional science courses, to earn a Professional Science Master’s designation)
Master’s of Science in Resource Management & Administration with Professional Science Master’s Designation (36 credits)
Students in AUNE’s Resource Management and Administration MS program can choose to follow the Professional Science Master’s (PSM) study track. The 36-credit RMA-PSM degree is open to those with prior professional experience. It allows you to supplement your current professional expertise by adding science courses. Earn a Professional Science Master’s and your MS in Resource Management and Administration.
Learn more at the Professional Science Master’s website. RMA students on a PSM-recognized Master’s track earn six (6) additional credits of science and math.
These additional credits might include: any Science-based field study trip; any Vertebrate Ecology course (e.g., herpetology, mammalogy, ornithology); Biostatistics; Conservation Biology; Conservation Psychology; Environmental Assessment Techniques; Geographical Information Systems (GIS); Natural Resource Inventory; Wetlands Ecology; or Wildlife and Forest Management.
International Service Program
Combine this degree program with Peace Corps service. Through the AUNE International Service Program, you can earn credit for your service, apply what you are learning to create positive change across the world, and save thousands of dollars on your degree.
Career Outlook
RMA graduates have secured positions in the following areas after graduating from the program:
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- Nonprofit conservation and advocacy organizations at the local, national, and international level
- Government departments that manage natural resources, regulate pollution, or monitor environmental compliance
- Public agencies concerned with local and regional land use planning, or which acquire and manage open space
- Environmental consulting businesses engaged in land management and sustainable development, wetlands protection, water resource management, and environmental impact assessment
- Private industry and institutions engaged in meeting regulations for environmental compliance and developing ecologically sustainable management systems
- Entrepreneurship and business start-ups
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of their Master of Science program in Resource Management and Administration, students are able to:
- Identify and understand the scientific and social complexities within the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies including ethics, sustainability, and social justice
- Apply quantitative, spatial and qualitative research approaches to addressing science-based problems
- Critically assess scientific and economic research
- Understand the interrelationships among, and between, public policy, science, economics, and law
- Demonstrate and apply skills in external stakeholder capacity building
- Demonstrate and apply skills in facilitative and adaptive leadership
- Draw on theory to inform the practice of change management at multiple organizational scales
- Effectively manage complex projects and associated budgets and timelines
- Understand the definition and requirements of organizational sustainability