Conway School of Landscape Design-Link to home map of Conway, MA Graduate Program in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design

Our method:  Not your garden-variety graduate school experience

A Conway education is for life—your life—not for a single profession that someone else or history has defined. Unlike many professional degree programs, a Conway masters degree is not narrowly focused. Instead of educating students to fit into tidy professional categories, we help each student define an individual path that is meaningful and promising for that student and for the planet. Thirty-three years of Conway graduates who have gone on to meaningful and diverse work bear out the success of this unconventional but effective approach.

Learning by doing

For most designers, learning by doing is the most efficient and effective way to learn. By applying classroom concepts to real projects of varying scales, Conway students rapidly develop the skills and knowledge to be responsible and independent designers and planners. This process of discovery is more effective than memorizing facts or formulas and is better suited to discovering the essentials of sustainable design.

At Conway, students learn how to be self-educators by helping direct their own educations. To this end, students identify individual educational goals at the beginning of the year and monitor the achievement of those goals as the year progresses. This skill encourages graduates to be life-long learners.

Instruction at Conway goes beyond techniques, stressing the processes that organize techniques and strategies and reveal underlying concepts. The ability to use an organized process enables the student to address a wide range of environmental problems and take advantage of diverse opportunities.

Clear, concise communication—oral, written, and visual—is essential to success as a landscape visionary. The landscape designer must not only be able to develop reasonable designs but also must be able to explain why these designs work.

The Master of Arts in Landscape Design (MALD) program offered at Conway represents an integrated curriculum where classes complement design practice. Instruction occurs in a small, intimate, and supportive environment. There is an unambiguous emphasis on ecological and social responsibility, oral and written communication skills, and project management. We define the words landscape and design very broadly to cover diverse topics in sustainable design and planning.

Accredited Masters Degree

Conway grants its masters degree by the authority of the Massachusetts Council of Higher Education. The school is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc.