When Weinberg sophomore Lisa Glennon flew to school after Winter Break, she didn’t see Lake Michigan or the Hancock Tower from the plane window.

Instead, she saw miles of Arizona desert.

“I just thought, ‘Oh, god, I’m spending a semester in a wasteland,'” said Glennon, who traded organic chemistry labs at the Technological Institute for functioning environmental systems at the Biosphere 2 Center.

Glennon, the recipient of a full scholarship from Volvo, said she has stopped thinking of Arizona as a wasteland after studying its ecology and biology during the semester-long Columbia University program.

Kendra Crook, Biosphere’s assistant director of student admissions, said the program was designed to give science students a chance to see firsthand what they study during lectures, including ecology, biology, political science and economics.

“If you’re a French student, you go to France,” Crook said. “What do you do if you’re a biology student or an ecology student? You go to a foreign country to learn a foreign culture, and what we’re doing is learning a foreign ecosystem. For most students, there’s nothing more foreign than Arizona.”

The Biosphere, which houses five different ecosystems under glass, began hosting the program in 1996 with 23 students. Last semester, 89 students participated.

Students attend lectures at the center one day a week, when professors from four different fields team-teach, tying together different aspects of larger topics. Crook said the interdisciplinary nature of the program teaches students how to think about problems from all perspectives.

“We have been creating a nation of biologists and a nation of geologists and political scientists — but they can’t talk to each other because they don’t have a common language, and they don’t have a sense of how to present the problem to someone else who is not scientific,” Crook said. “Biologists can rattle off problem after problem, but when you go to the government — to someone who’s a political scientist — how do you translate that into English for them?”

Crook said the students are introduced to a subject from one angle, like how the Hoover Dam affects the surrounding ecology. While that lesson is still fresh in their minds, they hear another lecture from a political scientist about how that certain spot was chosen to put a dam.

“So the idea is that you’re talking from all different sides at the same time,” Crook said.

Students in the program are also required to spend one day each week working on a research project. Glennon is studying how the lack of ultraviolet light passing through the center’s glass affects its living coral reef.

Two weeks ago Glennon and other students went to California to study the western edge of the Sonoran desert. They started below sea level, where they listened to a lecture about the area and wrote down their observations. Then they drove to higher spots to see the changes in vegetation and ecology at different altitudes.

In February the students traveled to Mexico to study sand dunes.

Glennon said her experience at Biosphere so far has made her change her major from the strictly science-based environmental science and evolutionary biology to the more applied science of environmental biology. After working with “pure” scientists, she learned that they spend only about 10 percent of their time in the lab and the remaining time analyzing data.

“We’ve helped them do their work and it really wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be,” Glennon said. “You don’t spend that much time in the lab or the field. It didn’t really appeal to me very much.”

For now Glennon will continue learning about the rainforests and coral reefs in the middle of the Arizona desert while her NU classmates spend hours at the library.

“I could never imagine going mountain biking for a day with my orgo professor at Northwestern,” she said.