“Your choices are totally open” – Vince Wilson remembers the beginnings of CES

BATON ROUGE - Vince Wilson remembers well the first semester the College of the Coast & Environment offered the Coastal Environmental Science degree. “In the fall of 2008, when the program started, we had a whole five students,” he recalls.

Wilson, a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, recently stepped down from his position as director of undergraduate programs at CC&E. During his fourteen-year tenure as director, the program saw exponential growth, and currently boasts over 300 graduates.

Wilson was instrumental in steering the direction of the program. He took inspiration from his own career as a children’s cancer researcher, which saw him conducting research at the National Institutes of Health, the Children’s Cancer Center of Los Angeles, and the University of Colorado. His experiences led him to believe young scientists would benefit from gaining a broad scientific perspective early on. He wanted to help students avoid siloing themselves academically too quickly.

Therefore, the CES major was designed with “very solid math and science base, and [an] upper division that has a lot of elective choices,” he said.  This would also allow students greater versatility later on.

The success of this, he said, is reflected in the sheer volume of choices students have made with their careers once they graduate with CES. “Your choices are totally open. And where our students have ended up, where they've gone career-wise, demonstrates it. [T]here's no program I know that matches our success as far as where our alumni have gone.”

Now that he has stepped down, Wilson is looking forward to teaching and having more time to travel and visit with his children and grandchildren.