With President Barack Obama's pledge for investment in alternative energies, graduate students and professors in the Haas School of Business are turning to the growing green sector as a way to gain an edge in a dismal job market.

Because student demand is up this semester for business graduate courses about environmental issues, the school is considering adding more courses in the future, said Catherine Wolfram, an associate professor and co-executive director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation.

In her Energy and Environmental Markets course, usually about 40 to 50 students enroll. This year, 107 students showed up on the first day.

"There was so much demand from Haas students that we can't accommodate others," she said.

Wolfram said the spike in student interest may have been motivated by the crisis in the financial and housing sectors. Students can expect better job opportunities in an industry that is searching for innovative minds to solve complex environmental problems, she said.

"In order to address climate change and energy independence, they are going to need informative and innovative changes to take place," she said. "That's where the business schools come in."

Business schools across the country, such as those at Yale and Stanford, are developing more green curricula so graduates can boost their employability, said Christine Rosen, an associate professor at the school, who taught a course on sustainability and business innovation.

Haas is keeping up with the trend, offering four to five courses on clean technology this semester, with plans to add more.

"(Green courses have) become very hot at Haas and at other departments," Rosen said.

She added that the specialized experience graduate students gain from these courses is what employers are looking for.

"It's making them more marketable because increasingly, companies are interested in students who understand these markets," she said.

Last fall, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory formed a partnership with students from the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative-an interdisciplinary organization founded by business graduate students. The partnership is meant to assess the commercial viability of clean technologies.

Adam Lorimer, a first-year business graduate student and the vice president of sponsorship for the student organization, said the partnership's focus on developing business management plans is one way to boost not only resumes, but also the economy.

"It's more about creating jobs than increasing employability," he said.

Last fall, Lorimer participated in the partnership, Cleantech to Market, as a member of a team that evaluated the marketability of a biofuel technology that treats wood and plant waste.

Ikhlaq Sidhu, co-chair of the Management of Technology Program and an adjunct professor of industrial engineering and operations research, is teaching a new business graduate course this semester that will work with a Palo Alto company on developing a Bay Area electric-car network.

He said the collaboration between engineering and business graduate students is important, because business and clean technology benefit each other.

"They're just not really business issues by themselves, and they are not really technical issues themselves," Sidhu said.

Tags: GREEN TECHNOLOGY, HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS