Students take their first steps towards a green career

October 3, 2025

Last month, we welcomed our latest cohort of postgraduate students to CAT as they embarked upon a transformative educational journey delving into sustainability and solutions.

A unique approach to learning

CAT’s Graduate School of the Environment courses offer a big-picture integrated approach to sustainability, providing our students with the knowledge, practical skills and inspiration to take action on the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Our courses mix academic learning with practical workshops from academics who are experts in their fields and cover a wide range of sustainability-related topics, enabling CAT students to go on to make a real difference in a variety of career pathways, from researching solutions, advising on climate policy, sustainable architecture, and beyond.

During our taught modules, students join us for a week-long intensive teaching week, before continuing their coursework from home, with a distance learning option available for our MSc and MRes courses. This approach helps provide our students with the flexibility to fit their studies around work, their families and other commitments.

Sustainability in action

One of the results of having intensive teaching weeks is that there is always a special buzz around CAT when students are on-site, and this year’s first lot of teaching week, for both our MSc, MRes and M.Arch students, was especially electric.

For those students able to join on-site, they are not only treated to incredible views. They can also benefit from CAT’s more than 50 years of sustainability experience that has transformed the CAT site from a disused slate quarry into a living laboratory, showcasing sustainability in action, including:

Experimental sustainably designed buildings – including rammed earth and straw bale buildings.
Organically managed gardens that provide a useful teaching space and supply fresh fruit and vegetables to the CAT Cafe.
Sustainably managed woodlands providing both timber and rich habitats for a diverse range of wildlife, including bats, foxes, badgers, dormice, pine martens and more.

Students conducting an ecological survey

MSc and MRes courses

Our MSc courses and our MRes Sustainability and Adaptation all begin with a shared module, Introduction to Sustainability and Adaptation.

By bringing together students from all our MSc and MRes courses, from Sustainability and Behaviour Change, to Green Building, the first week sees a real cross-fertilisation of ideas, as students with different skillsets and backgrounds discuss what they have been learning.

Over the teaching week, students were introduced to sustainability and transformational adaptation concepts and theories ranging from systems thinking, behaviour change and climate policy to ecosystems, to land use and the built environment.

Highlights of the week included:

A workshop assessing the durability of timber buildings on-site at CAT.
An activity assessing the negative impacts of invasive plants such as Rhododendron ponticum on native flora and fauna.
A walk in the hills above CAT to collect and analyse wind data.
An activity assessing the negative impacts of invasive plants such as Rhododendron ponticum on native flora and fauna.
Guest lecturer Susan Steed gave a talk on transformation and economics.
A workshop exploring food systems from production, processing, distribution and consumption.
A film screening of Plan Z – with some of the filmmakers joining us online for a Q&A.
CAT graduates returned for a panel where they shared their experiences of studying with us, along with some of the incredible things they are doing now. One graduate who returned was Ruth Chapman, now Executive Managing Director of Dulas Limited, a company that originally started at CAT, which works on renewable energy and life-saving vaccine solar fridges.
Meeting and talking to our new students and making new connections!

M.Arch in Sustainable Architecture (ARB Part 2)

A course with sustainability at its core, alongside academic learning, our M.Arch in Sustainable Architecture course provides students with the chance to develop practical building skills, gain experience using a range of sustainable building materials, and learn from our five decades of experimenting with sustainable design.

If you ever visit CAT during an architecture teaching week, you are sure to see a host of students doing something interesting, and the first week for our 2025 cohort was no exception. Students could be seen across the site sketching, touring the many examples of innovative and experimental sustainable buildings at CAT, or in various spots discussing their lectures and other practical workshops.

Highlights during the week have included:

A site visit to Bangor, North Wales, where students familiarised themselves with the location ahead of their community engagement project, which will take place in the city.
A tour of CAT’s green buildings.
Sketching workshops with architect Chris Loyn surveying CAT’s natural environment and sustainable buildings.
A ‘Banquet of Books’ workshop, where lecturer and architect Zoe Quick explored reading as a form of commoning, and the sociality, materiality, and political ecologies of ‘reading for resilience.’
Lectures exploring sustainability in the built environment from CAT staff, including a lecture from our Zero Carbon Britain Innovation Lab team.

Interested in studying at CAT?

Visit us either in person or online for one of our upcoming postgraduate Open Days. Our Open Days will give you the chance to hear from CAT staff, students and graduates about what it’s actually like to study at CAT, with plenty of chances for questions.

Join a CAT teaching week as a Short Course

We’ve opened up a few spaces on some of our upcoming teaching weeks, which is great if you want to delve into a specific sustainability-related topic or get a real taste of what it’s like to study a postgraduate course at CAT.

Visit our short course page to see more upcoming courses.