Master of Arts in Whole Systems Design

 

Unique Offering/Advantages

Learn to Design Positive Change and Sustainable Solutions

Antioch University Seattle's MA in Whole Systems Design prepares you to design creative alternatives to today's social, organizational, and environmental challenges. This program equips you to think differently about the world and your place in it.

• Approach situations in terms of their contexts, interrelationships, and dynamics
• Imagine and create new possibilities
• Work with others to design integrated approaches to problem solving

General Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree
• At least two years of relevant work experience
• Ability to work collaboratively with other students and faculty in an interdisciplinary learning environment
• Ability for reflection, self-awareness, critical thinking, and sustained inquiry

Length of Program

You can finish your degree MA in Whole Systems Design in 21 months when you enroll full-time. You have up to six years to complete your degree. Designed to complement your real-world priorities, the program offers a convenient class schedule with all courses offered in a four-day weekend module just once a month.

The program begins in October or April.

In addition to your master’s degree, you earn certificates in Integrated Skills for Sustainable Change and Systems Thinking and Design.

Tuition & Fees

• Tuition: $662 per credit
• Required fees: $145 per quarter
• $6,765 tuition and required fees per quarter, full time (10 credits)
• $27,060 typical annual tuition and fees

Annual tuition and fees based on 2013-14 rates for four quarters. Antioch University Seattle students typically attend classes all year.

Career Opportunities

An MA Whole Systems Design may lead to a promotion with your current employer, a job in a new business, or a stronger competitive advantage for your own entrepreneurial venture. Some areas of possibility include:

• education or teaching
• management or administration
• consulting or training
• planning or architecture
• science or engineering
• politics or leadership
• many, many other exciting professions

Recent sampling of alumni jobs:

• policy analyst, City of Vancouver, B.C., Sewer and Water Division
• executive director of the Washington State Arts Commission
• manager for the U.S. Forest Service
• co-founder and executive director of an international nonprofit agency activist who works with indigenous people in South America to change mining practices that have threatened their health and land
• program manager, Sustainable Building Advisor Institute
• community services manager, Express Credit Union, a community-based and member-owned nonprofit financial institution serving those with low- and moderate-incomes
• civic and social organization professional, resident of a nonprofit and intentional community farm
• director of sustainability and associate faculty, Prescott College
• event/incident manager, The Boeing Company
• finance director, I-TECH, University of Washington

Learn to Design Positive Change and Sustainable Solutions

Antioch University Seattle’s Whole Systems Design program helps you to become a designer and leader of deep systemic change in a variety of settings that include communities, organizations, and businesses, and the environment. You learn to see systemic patterns and connections among personal, organizational, social, and environmental domains. Using this knowledge, you design elegant solutions that can be leveraged to resolve related issues.

• discover the systemic connections between seemingly disparate issues identify their underlying common causes
• design solutions that can be leveraged to resolve multiple related issues
• go beyond narrow problem definitions
• view complex real-world situations in terms of their contexts, interrelationships, and dynamics
• synthesize and integrate different events, activities, and phenomena

The Center for Creative Change Graduate Student Symposium features your graduate research and community-focused change project. Your work may be published on Antioch University websites and in the community as well.

Building on AUS’s tradition of experiential education and socially engaged citizenship, the Center for Creative Change offers degree and certificate programs so you can become a leader for

• organizational, social, and environmental sustainability
• social justice and
• transformative social change.

All Center for Creative Change programs are based on the understanding that creative change requires a fundamental shift in peoples’ awareness and behavior. Solutions to the complex social and environmental challenges of the 21st century require new ways of thinking. This perspective recognizes the dynamic, interdependent nature of human and environmental systems and honors diverse perspectives, traditions and ways of knowing. As a student in C3, you will learn skills, attitudes and perspectives to be a change leader.

Faculty

Click here for to read about Center faculty. For adjunct faculty who teach in the Center for Creative Change, click here.