The Department of Communication and Design’s new core curriculum course, COMD 358 – Professional Communication, integrated the university’s new sustainability initiative into its final project assignment last semester, with students teaming up to develop sustainability projects that could be implemented on campus.
The assignment allowed students to enhance their teamwork and presentation skills while coming up with creative and community-based sustainability initiatives for Bilkent. This was in line with the course’s goal of helping students from all academic disciplines develop
communication skills that will be of use in their future careers as well as the ability to engage in teamwork and to design professional presentations.
For their final projects, the students researched the topic of sustainability. Each team then developed a feasible sustainability idea for the university and presented a plan in class outlining how this idea could be implemented on campus and communicated to the Bilkent community.
The projects looked at many aspects of sustainability, ranging from environmental awareness to the betterment of human health on campus. Specifically, they explored the possibility of instituting, implementing or installing wind turbines, composting, bike lanes, reverse vending machines, energy-creating pavements, secondhand shops, donation centers, textile production from used coffee grounds, a GE course on sustainability issues, bicycle rental stations, and the reduction of paper waste by mandating two-sided printing, using one’s own bottles and mugs, or using recyclable hygiene products or paper cups.
The process of choosing sustainability projects for Bilkent expanded students’ awareness regarding sustainability and their sense of responsibility for the community. “It was interesting to see students come up with creative ideas that could be easily implemented on campus,” said course coordinator Emel Özdora. “We plan to present these ideas to the university administration and hope that at least a few of them can in fact be implemented.”