Philéas Dazeley-Gaist
The type of education you get at COA forces you to constantly question the things you’re learning, and to relate them to other things in your life and in your educational journey. And that’s something I really value because it means you’re never taking anything for granted.
Your views are constantly open to changing and to growing. And that means you yourself are open to changing and growing. I had really encouraging teachers who cared about making sure that I actually understood what was going on more than they cared about me doing things a certain way.
There are all sorts of amazing classes, but in your first couple of years, you have to be open to picking a bunch of things that you had no idea you might be interested in. My advice is, let yourself experience these things and engage with them, because it turns out that they can be really transformative, and I think it’s by design… it’s imposing interdisciplinarity on you.
I wasn’t really interested in maths at all when I got to COA. Classes like Chaos and Fractals, Math and Physics of Sustainable Energy, and Biostatistics oriented me in that direction. When I learned about complexity science and complex systems from [professor] Dave Feldman, I just fell into that world and decided that this is exactly what appeals to me.
I totally drank the human ecology Kool-Aid at COA… Human ecology is a wonderful discipline. It’s fantastic what we do. We need more people and more settings where we’re confronting the way that human beings become intertwined with their environments and the way that we’re all part of a network of ecological interactions.