CSUN Turns Environmental Awareness Into a Career : Education: A curriculum guides students into professions focusing on public health and safety.

“I sat there fascinated,” Laura Malcolm reminisced, speaking about Dennis Kelly’s class on environmental health. “Everything he said in class pertained to you--food quality, water quality, garbage disposal, air--things everybody deals with.”

At that time in 1985, she had taken the class merely as a general education elective. Undergraduates at Cal State Northridge pick such courses in their serendipitous journey through college. But Kelly’s teaching techniques over the years have attracted enrollees beyond the students who would usually be interested in such a topic.

“It sort of dawned on me,” Malcolm added, “all this stuff he was saying was going on, to protect you and protect the environment, and you didn’t know about it. He didn’t pitch it as a career, but each topic in the class was a field in itself, and I was beginning to think about the job market.”

So she went up to him afterward and asked about specific jobs in the field.

His answer inspired her to switch her major from biology to the CSUN program Kelly heads: environmental and occupational health.

Today, she is co-leader of a first-response team at Lockheed Advanced Development Co. Her crew suits up and handles environmental emergencies and check-ups for the company in Burbank and Palmdale. “We’re the shutdown authority” for an area that includes the company and the surrounding community, she said.

In recruiting members, her trade organization, the 10,000-member American Industrial Hygiene Assn., groups the jobs she and her colleagues perform under the romantic rubric: “detectives of the workplace.”

Brad Smith was an undergraduate at CSUN in the ‘70s who knew what he wanted to be--a physiotherapist. But that particular program was filled, so his counselor suggested the environmental health program.

“I discovered that the field was about making sure my kids didn’t develop some kind of disease from industrial stuff in the neighborhood.” And because he already had taken the required basic science classes, he could make the switch easily.

After a stint monitoring industrial accident hazards for an insurance company, he is directing a unit at a Van Nuys metals firm, Superior Industrial International Inc. “I make sure they’re in compliance with environmental laws, so the company is the first to know if there is a health problem.”

He also trains CSUN interns. And the minute he has an opening in his unit, he plans to employ one of them full-time. That’s how he got his own job, by the way: Graduates of the program tend to hire one another.

Actually, he said, new graduates are usually offered two or three jobs even before they have their diplomas.

Nationally accredited since 1973, the program was set up in the late ‘60s by Lennin Glass, who took it upon himself to move the CSUN health science curriculum in an environmental direction. He designed the program and recruited Kelly. Now dean emeritus, Glass says he is “delighted with the way the program has blossomed.”

These days, it is “probably the best-known program in the country,” said Howard Spielman, chairman of the California Industrial Hygiene Council, a trade organization that promotes high standards in the profession.

“They get very good jobs,” said Frank Gomez, chairman of the National Environmental Health Science and Protection Accreditation Council. As a teacher at UCLA and a health official with Los Angeles County, he has been able to study the Northridge program close up.

The council on which he serves requires him to maintain a national perspective since it’s the accrediting body for about 60 university programs in the field. Speaking of CSUN, he said: “When you track their performance, they are overall the best and getting better. They’re now attracting students who used to go into medicine or chemistry.”

CSUN also has the largest number of graduates of any school in the country, averaging 60 bachelor’s degrees and 30 master’s annually. The average in the competing programs is 30 graduates.

Gomez eagerly accepts invitations to guest lecture at CSUN’s classes because, like Smith, he can use the opportunity to recruit for his department.

Barry Stern, head of the U. S. Public Health Service’s professional development unit in Washington, was quick to point out why these graduates are in demand. “The jobs are there in California due to the prevalence of environmental laws.”

CSUN has become the largest supplier of environmental professionals for Southern California business, government and consultant firms such as Hughes, Lockheed and Arco. Graduates also work for Du Pont and other large firms in the East.

But Stern mused on the phone from Washington: “If you can get a steady job in Southern California, why go anywhere else?” One-third of the graduates work for industry, one-third for government and, nowadays, one-third for consultant firms that serve both.

The program’s full-time faculty of five Ph.D.s, plus eight adjunct or visiting professors, puts students through a heavily science-oriented curriculum. The course names alone reveal that the work is not for the faint-hearted: epidemiology, public health microbiology, radiological health, industrial toxicology, environmental and occupational health law.

Half the enrollees are women. Lori Price, who, like Smith started out as a physical therapy student, is now a master’s candidate in the program.

During the day, she works for Mike Christensen, director of CSUN’s campuswide environmental health and safety program. She attends classes at night, as do the majority of the advanced-degree students. In an interesting case of “doctor, heal thyself,” they are, as Christensen puts it, “consultants to the university to resolve environmental situations before they get bad.”

Kelly and his fellow teachers have accepted another campus-related role. “It’s critical that we help minorities enter this profession,” said Peter Bellin, who teaches the program’s toxicology courses. Through a series of transfer agreements with community colleges such as those in Los Angeles, Glendale, Santa Monica, Oxnard, Ventura and San Bernardino, students may begin their environmental studies close to home and transfer to CSUN later.

One-third of the program’s students get in this way. And partly because of this, 40% of the graduates in recent years have been minorities.

Malcolm summed up what makes these young people stay the course in a field that, until recently, was considered rather unsexy. “You feel like you’re marketable. You’re getting well-trained and the job market agrees. They’ll hire you. And soon you can become a manager in a number of fields.”