Sarah Trocchio, a sociology professor at Rider, is one of the leaders of the certificate program. She has studied the effects of marijuana since her days as a college student and has seen how society has pivoted its view of cannabis use.
She saw the changing landscape and recent legislation as an opportunity and is hoping to help students, as well as anyone outside the university, obtain a certificate that can give them a chance to start a career in a burgeoning industry.
“We’re really trying to do something innovative for higher education and also innovative in the cannabis industry. … I’ve been studying and working on cannabis related issues, particularly as they relate to social equity concerns, for the better part of a decade,” Trocchio said. “One of the things that I was really interested in when I became a faculty at Rider, was thinking about how we could continue to engage in conversations about what was happening in terms of the shifting landscape with cannabis and bring some of that content directly to students at Rider.”
Trocchio started this discourse by running a special topics course in the 2020-21 school year called “Reefer Madness: From Panic to Profit,” which focused on the evolution of cannabis policy in the United States, and is building off the success from that course to design the certificate program.