Video Transcripts

The Integrated Resource Management degree combines three colleges and their expertise from a research and a teaching base. Today's agricultural professionals are going to be required to manage land, animal, human resources, and a significant business component in order to ensure sustainability of our agricultural communities. There is a lot of agendas, changes in our landscape that are going on across the United States. It depends on who you are talking to, what they want the land for. Municipalities would like it for open space and outdoor recreation. Traditional agriculture would like for it to produce animals and food and fiber. You have wildlife that comes into that, recreation, and maintain the rural heritage of our agricultural families. There is also a large trend going through the United States now of absentee landowners and conservation trusts purchasing large tracts of land. This program provides the opportunities for this new kind of manager. We can't just teach you like a normal traditional disciplinary program anymore. It's got to be from a holistic approach. We got to be able to look at business, animals, people, land management, stewardship, conservation - that's the key to this program, and that's our primary objective is helping new managers, training new managers to be able to acquire those skills.

This program is presented on campus, but I understand that not all people can come to campus and take off from their job. The online version also is very directed, so you can stay on track, you know where you need to be at any given time to progress in a sequence through the semester throughout the curriculum.

We are going to give you some information to lay a foundation, but we are going to actually ask you to apply those to real world scenarios and real world problems and that’s what problem based learning is about.

We also try to provide a very meaningful interaction between students. One of the things we pride ourselves on in this program is trying to create relationships between faculty and students. We have actually used a software called Adobe Connect where we can do a real time, office hours through video streaming and through web cams where I can actually talk to students as they are in the class. I can answer their questions directly. We also have internships that are built in to this program as well. The purpose of that internship is not to be another hoop for you to jump through. What we want those internships do is to give you some experience in the real world.

Give me a call, and let's talk about your goals and your objectives, and let's see if this program will take you where you want to go.