Cornell offers both undergraduate and graduate students the option to minor in Sustainable Energy Systems. These minors offer students a wide array of coursework spanning multiple colleges within the University. The breadth of concentrations and options make this minor something that students can focus in on their area of interest, or inversely gain exposure to a variety of areas within sustainable energy.

Undergraduate Minor

Offered collaboratively by Biological and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The minor is intended to emphasize the importance of viewing the challenge of meeting the world’s energy needs as a system of interacting themes. The requirements of the minor are designed to provide breadth across a range of energy resource types and conversion, transmission and storage technologies along with coverage of the environmental, economic, political, and social consequences of various options.

Graduate Minor

This minor is available for students enrolled in a MS or PhD degree, and is intended to integrate scientific and engineering principles that focus on the creation, analysis, and improvement of energy technologies, with knowledge of environmental systems potentially impacted by energy production, and with an understanding of human systems that are intertwined with energy-related decisions. An outcome of the minor should be an understanding of the ways in which those themes interact as a system, all of whose parts need to be understood and successfully integrated in order to progress toward meeting the world’s energy needs.