Ecologue

2014 AASHE Conference (Portland, Oregon)

2014 conference for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education was an extremely informative and gratifying experience. During the conference I attended a variety of sessions, the most enlightening ones involving communication strategies surrounding sustainability. I learned a great deal about the barriers that sustainable practices are facing in the media industry and what changes are needed to connect with certain audiences. As is true with many innovations, the concept of sustainability is struggling to take off because it has not yet reached critical mass, or the minimum number of people for the concept to diffuse into American society.

These key concepts in communication will be crucial to develop my career as a New Media major and for my current job at the Sustainability Office. Understanding one’s audience and why a particular concept is struggling to be accepted can make or break the diffusion of an innovation. These same concepts can be applied on a macro and micro level of sustainability as well as most other concepts.

Surrounding the topic of sustainability, I learned that we are often targeting the wrong audience with our messages. The small percentage of people that have already embraced the concept of sustainability don’t need any more convincing, even though they are the ones our messages reach most frequently. To make the biggest difference we need to target the later adopters, or the ones who require some convincing through education and/or peer pressure. Once these people grasp the concepts we are trying to promote, the knowledge should spread at an unprecedented rate.

By learning these skills at the AASHE conference, I was able to educate others in the sustainability community here at OSU and hopefully they will utilize these concepts to further their own ventures in sustainability. In the future I plan to apply all of the communication concepts that I learned to my various media roles. As a New Media major, in the future I will likely deal with many concepts that bear similarities to the sustainability concept and will use the techniques I have learned in those as well.

It was a pleasure to be one of the host universities at the conference as well, alongside schools like Portland State and Lewis and Clark. Along with other attendees from OSU, I spent time at our university’s table handing out information to AASHE guests and answering questions about OSU’s practices in sustainability.

Attending the AASHE conference this year was extremely useful for my personal, academic, and professional life. I learned an unprecedented amount of information that I plan on applying during my time here are OSU and in my future career. Thank you for funding this invaluable opportunity.