Junior Year Writing in the College of Natural Sciences is an interdisciplinary writing course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that brings together students from a range of undergraduate majors in the natural sciences to produce collaborative persuasive research papers.
Students come from the following departments and majors:
Department of Environmental Conservation
- environmental science major
- natural resources conservation major
- fisheries ecology & conservation concentration
- wildlife ecology & conservation concentration
- forest ecology & conservation concentration
- environmental conservation concentration
- water resources concentration
- urban forestry & arboriculture concentration
- building and construction technology major
Stockbridge School of Agriculture
- horticultural science
- turfgrass science & management
- plant and soil sciences
- sustainable food & farming
- geology
- earth systems
Department of Veterinary & Animal Sciences
- animal science
- pre-veterinary science
Articles posted to this blog are the final papers produced by multi-disciplinary groups of students in the course. Posted papers are unedited and did not undergo any editorial review. In these papers, student set out to identify a problem, explore the causes and impacts of that problem, and propose a solution to alleviate the problem. The papers are argumentative in nature, intending to persuade the reader of the proposal and defend the proposal against opposing arguments.