I am an Associate in Technology, Innovation, and Strategic Alliances for Waste Management Sustainability Services. I do Sustainability Consulting, including research and vetting of new technologies and innovations and strategic partnerships for our customers.
Location: Houston, TX
Discuss your general career path since graduating from UT.
After graduating from UT, I spent a summer as the sustainability coordinator at a summer camp, working in an organic garden and coordinating a recycling program. With that experience, I was able to gain the necessary skills to work at Waste Management, assisting customers with solving recycling and diversion-related challenges and improving sustainability efforts. My current role is focused on researching and vetting new technologies and innovative solutions and strategic partnerships for our customers.
How did your BDP experience influence your career path and interests?
My BDP experience helped me understand that sustainability is multifaceted and cannot be solved with experience from just a single industry. While interning with the U.S. Green Building Council of Central Texas – Balcones Chapter for one of my Connecting Experiences, I participated in a study group for the LEED Green Associate Exam, which helped me understand green building and LEED requirements and led me down the path to achieving my LEED AP.
What do you value most about your BDP experience?
Writing my Integration Essay really helped me bring together the lessons that I had learned in my engineering coursework and connect it to the environmental issues that I studied in my BDP classes and the forum seminar course.
In what ways did an interdisciplinary education prepare you for what you are currently doing?
The environmental issues that the world is facing today are inherently interdisciplinary. To solve these problems, we must bring together experts in science, technology, medicine, law, public policy, education, business, communication, and many other fields. The interdisciplinary nature of the BDPs helped me understand how to attack modern environmental issues from various angles and viewpoints to determine the best solution.