Smart and Sustainable Campus Conference

The most interesting experience I had while at the student summit of the Smart and Sustainable Campuses conference in Baltimore was learning how to tailor sustainable initiatives to fit different audiences in order to make our projects more successful back at school. One school was an all-girls school, and so they had focused on having incentives that revolved around women’s rights because that was something the students often felt passionately about, whereas here at Bentley we would be more concerned with focusing on the business aspects behind a sustainability initiative. What made this experience so interesting was the ability of students to collaborate on similar projects while still pursuing these different methods of approaching their schools, and still being able to offer different ideas as to what methods might be best to bring back to our own schools. One of the seminars at the conference was Project Management for Tree Huggers, which really emphasized this as it discussed all of the challenges we should anticipate facing in trying to engage an audience that may not have as deep an interest in sustainability as we do. We therefore learned that we need to stop thinking that there is only one straight path to the goals of our projects, because we are going to need multiple methods just to gage different interest groups, and then will likely have to change our approach along the way in order to adapt to different problems that arise. Overall, learning this made it such an interesting experience because even though we could be in this whole conference of people who felt as passionately about sustainability as we do, not everyone would have the same interest and so this ended up being a very important skills for us to learn, even if we might not have thought of it before.