19 January 2007 Environmental Management degree 'great course'

Environmental studies and rugby were always jointly at the centre of Matt France's life as a student at Lincoln University. Now, with his degree wrapped up, the former New Zealand Under-19 and Canterbury provincial representative player is out in the employment world taking the first steps on his career path.

Matt, who will be capped in Lincoln's April graduation ceremony, completed a Bachelor of Environmental Management degree at the end of 2006, with an individual major focused largely on planning.

"It was a great course and has definitely given me an employable qualification," he says.

"I always saw my degree and rugby as the two things that would take me forward into the future and thought that ideally a job with a regional council or a local authority would be something in which I could utilise the knowledge and skills gained through the degree."

Matt has pursued that aim and in February this year he won a job with New Plymouth District Council as a Building Administration Officer.

Rugby still occupies a big part of his life and he is also a contracted player with the Taranaki Rugby Football Union, in the training squad for 2007.

Matt came to Lincoln University after secondary education at Otago Boys' High School in Dunedin and Roncalli College, Timaru. In 2004 he was awarded a Rugby Scholarship and a Prime Minister's Scholarship.

Selected for the New Zealand Under-19s to play in the World Cup Championship of 2003 in France, Matt debuted for Canterbury as halfback in its Ranfurly Shield defence against South Canterbury last year. Earlier in the 2006 season, in the Super 14, he was in the Crusaders Wider Training Group as an understudy for first team halfbacks Andy Ellis and Kevin Senio.

Lincoln University's Bachelor of Environmental Management was introduced in 2004 and replaced the Bachelor of Resource Studies. The course's main focus is the study of the inter-connections between the ecological, social and economic aspects of the environment.

The degree is unique and distinctive in New Zealand as the only undergraduate qualification designed to provide multi-disciplinary training in policy, planning and management relating to the environment. There's a choice of two formal majors – natural resource management and policy and planning, and one major that allows students to develop their own specialisation.

Typically Lincoln University Environmental Management graduates are drawn to employment in private and public sector organisations involved in natural resources use, urban and regional planning, environmental protection and conservation.