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The 4W Initiative gets to the heart of what, in turn, SoHE stands for. It’s a special application of the Wisconsin Idea, aiming to improve the lives and health of women across the state and around the globe.
Learn MoreResearch & Innovation 4W Initiative
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The School of Human Ecology is working to include design thinking and consumer insights into a wide variety of programs because it wants to keep a human-centered point of view in front of the inventors and engineers who create spaces and products.
Learn MoreEducational Experience Design Thinking and Consumer Insights
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The major-specific component will increase access to SoHE’s personal finance program, both by increasing enrollment in the major itself and by offering a personal finance certificate to students in related majors, such as economics.
Learn MoreEducational Experience Financial Education and Capability for the 21st Century
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Find a better way. That’s what students and faculty from the School of Human Ecology (SoHE) do. They’re design thinkers who embrace problems from every angle, and use both creativity and intellect to generate the most effective solutions.
Learn MoreFaculty Excellence | Student Support School of Human Ecology Annual Fund
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Charles Raison is one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s best and brightest. Officially, he holds the position of Mary Sue and Mike Shannon Chair for Healthy Minds, Children & Families. In practice, he is a master of connecting ideas, research, and practice, leading the way in novel treatments for treating mental conditions. More simply put,… Read more »
Learn MoreFaculty Excellence Bridging the Divide Between Science and Application
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School of Human Ecology professor Christine Whelan, who has taught on everything from gender and marriage to social change, has turned her sights to the pursuit of happiness. What she’s uncovered has become the basis for one of the most talked-about classes on campus, Consuming Happiness. “Spending money to maximize happiness is the basis for… Read more »
Learn MoreResearch & Innovation Consuming Happiness: A Course for Buying a Better Life
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Creative thinking. Responsible leadership. Being a global citizen. These are qualities we put into practice every day. Undergraduate students in Design Studies, Retailing, and Consumer Science are thinking outside the textbooks to tackle societal issues on an international level by helping artisans in developing nations build better careers and foster strong communities. As part of… Read more »
Learn MoreEducational Experience Crafting Strong Communities Together
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A human ecology perspective can shape the world. When Elizabeth Doyle ’15 was an undergraduate in UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE), she studied community and nonprofit leadership. She showed such a passion for organizing people to improve housing, transportation, and education that she earned a Truman Scholarship — one of the nation’s most prestigious… Read more »
Learn MoreStudent Support Help a Student; Change the World
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Many of Helen Louise Allen’s students have a picture in their minds of their teacher sitting at a loom, her skilled hands creating — seemingly out of nothing — extraordinary textiles. But there was a side of the delightfully eccentric woman that few of her students ever saw: the hunter. Allen traveled the earth, scouring… Read more »
Learn MoreResearch & Innovation Holding the Fabric of Culture Together
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Badgers are known for their desire to do good: they join the Peace Corps in record numbers, they sign up for Teach For America, and they spend their academic breaks doing service projects. Badgers have good hearts, but do they have good heads — at least when it comes to giving? Thanks to the Philanthropy Lab,… Read more »
Learn MoreEducational Experience How to Do Good Better
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Early is the answer. If the question is how to solve Wisconsin’s achievement gap — the difference in poverty rates between its black and white citizens — then the answer is to act early. Wisconsin ranks 49th in the nation in the severity of its achievement gap, and the UW’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE) understands that… Read more »
Learn MoreResearch & Innovation Intervene Early. Intervene Often.
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Like a lot of graduate students in the School of Human Ecology’s (SoHE) human development and family studies program, Dave Smallen PhDx’18 wants to find a deeper understanding of how human minds and emotions work. Unlike a lot of grad students, however, he almost didn’t finish his undergraduate studies because in 2006, when he was… Read more »
Learn MoreStudent Support Life after Rock ‘n’ Roll
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UW–Madison students do great things, even when the cards are stack against them. Pablo Montes, a first-generation, working-class student, was dependent on aid when he transferred to UW–Madison. Once here, he was blindsided by the university’s steeper cost of living. Montes became homeless, couch-surfing among friends and unable even to get help from Wisconsin’s FoodShare… Read more »
Learn MoreStudent Support Once Homeless and Hungry, Grad Forges Forward for Change
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Word of SoHE’s Financial Life Skills (FLS) program has spread across campus, pushing enrollment from 100 students in its first year to 400 students, plus a wait list for year three. What’s driving the surge? In large part it’s the practical instruction in money management that one student described as “valuable information I’ll use the… Read more »
Learn MoreEducational Experience Personal Finance “Learning Lab” Drives Real ROI for Students & Peer Educators
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Knowing the past is part of any good education, but great education explores the past, illuminates the present, and anticipates tomorrow. By combining all three elements, SoHE prepares graduates for career success in retail, fashion, textiles, and consumer behavior, which means a deep dive into China. As China becomes an increasingly important market for American-made… Read more »
Learn MoreEducational Experience Staying Relevant in Retail: China & the World
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Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology, designed an energy-tracking app to make reducing day-to-day energy usage more accessible. Drawing on parallels between food consumption and energy use, Wong’s team designed “My Earth – Track Your Carbon Savings” with approaches used in food-tracking apps that help users catalog their… Read more »
Learn MoreResearch & Innovation Tracking Sustainable Behaviors