Electives
Terrascope Independent Activities Period (IAP) Subject
Terrascope offers a one-week class on museum exhibit design during IAP. Students will visit museums to meet with designers, visit exhibitions to observe and analyze the reaction of audiences, and begin to formulate their own ideas about museum design. This activity is the perfect lead-in to 1.016, Terrascope's spring subject. In 1.016, students will design and build museum exhibits to display information about the environmental problem posed the previous fall in 12.000 (Mission 2011).
IAP Subjects Offered by EAPS and CEE
The Departments of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) have long traditions of offering field, laboratory, and classroom learning opportunities during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP). The session is particularly well suited for off-campus study trips. For example, CEE has offered such an opportunity for its environmental engineering students over the last three years. Students have gone to the Everglades to receive instruction and carry out field work in this unique environment. They have gone to Hawaii and studied its geology, its flora and the quality of its coastal waters, and Australia to do field work in a variety of natural systems. EAPS has run month-long IAP geology field research programs in the Mohave Desert region for over two decades, and more recently has developed shorter environmental geology, general geophysics, and environmental geophysics field excursions to the Southwestern United States and to the Caribbean.
Every year, Terrascope students will have the opportunity to participate in one of these credit-bearing IAP field activities, although participation will not be required.
Students not participating in a field subject (or who participate in a shorter excursion), will have the opportunity to take other IAP subjects here on campus.
A sampling of spring semester subjects offered by EAPS and CEE includes:
1.00 Introduction
to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving
1.011 Project Evaluation
1.016 Introduction to Earth System Engineering and Science
1.082 Air Pollution: Processes and Controls
12.001 Introduction to Geology
12.004 Introduction to Planetary Science
12.119 Analytical Techniques for Studying Environmental and Geologic Samples
12.301 Past and Present Climate
A date base of environmental classes at MIT can be found at the following page: http://enviroclasses.mit.edu/about.php
