The Department of Earth and Climate Sciences added two new classes to their department this year. Professor Noel Heim began teaching Geology of National Parks in the fall of 2025 and Professor and ECS Department Chair Jill VanTongeren began teaching Natural Disasters in Movies this semester.
The ECS department, one of Tufts’ smaller departments, hopes to reach students from more diverse majors with these new classes. The Dinosaurs! class, available to students for the past couple of years, has been a very popular class drawing a variety of different majors.
“We were hoping to expand the number of students that we reach every semester or every year by offering potentially non-major courses, but ones that might spark curiosity or additional interest from students,” VanTongeren said. “And Dinosaurs definitely is one of those that gets people excited.”
Both Heim and VanTongeren said they want students to have experience in the ECS department to determine if they want to major in earth or climate science.
“[The ECS department] added a new climate science major in addition to our earth science major, and we’re hoping to recruit lots of people to be interested in these subjects,” VanTongeren said.
Heim limited Geology of National Parks to only first-year students with the goal of drawing in more earth and climate science majors.
“We want to have more majors rather than more students passing through and so that is why we decided to limit the class to first-years [which] will hopefully take students who aren’t familiar with geology, but have this interest in national parks, and then show them that they can do [it as] a major,” he said.
Heim designed the Geology of National Parks class to cover the same content as Intro to the Earth, Resources and Environments course, but allow students to have more field research experience.
“I try to make it interactive, so students work on problem sets and small projects for a lot of class time, so it’s not just receiving lectures,” Heim said. “I got to know the students well [and] the students got to know each other well.
The class also had a field trip to Acadia National Park in October, where they went camping and got to learn about geology in an interactive way.
“Acadia National Park was something that we talked about in class and looked at [on] the geologic maps, and then got a chance to go and actually see the rocks that we were learning about and what they meant,” Heim said.
VanTongeren spoke about her own experience in college, expressing hope that the new course offerings will draw in students who may not initially expect to pursue an earth or climate science major.
“Many of us don’t graduate high school or go to college, thinking that we’re going to be geologists or Earth and climate scientists, and I was the same,” VanTongeren said. “I thought I was going to be a linguist, and I took a class in geology, and I was just totally hooked by all the amazing field opportunities and whatnot.”
Emma Harvey, a sophomore psychology and child studies major, has taken two classes within the ECS department: Introduction to Environmental Science and Dinosaurs! Harvey compared her experience taking these two classes in the ECS department, noting differing levels of rigor in the introductory and elective course.
“The Intro to Environmental Studies course definitely felt … more like an actual environmental studies class,” Harvey said. “I think it felt more relevant to the real world, because we talked a lot about how environmental policy impacts society whereas I felt like Dinosaurs! was more of the cop out class for non-science people who need a science credit.”
In response to hearing about the two new courses offered this semester, Emma expressed interest in taking classes that seemed more approachable.
“Both of those classes sound really interesting to me,” Harvey said. “I think they might not have as much overarching value as a typical environmental studies or Earth sciences class, but I think the fact that they draw in students from other areas and other majors can be, in and of itself, valuable.”
