Although I experimented with other majors my first year at Bates, I found it easy to commit to an Environmental Studies major my sophomore year. In the back of my head, I knew I wasn’t ready for the intensity of architecture school and wanted a well-rounded liberal arts college experience to create a foundational base for me as an adult. This conviction guided me in the classes I took and translated into a major that I tailored around environmental design. My interest in construction and development from an environmental perspective culminated in my thesis, a sustainable retrofit of a house on Frye Street. My role as the office sustainability and design resilience leader for Gensler Boston would not have been possible without my environmental studies experience at Bates. The systems thinking skills and ability to critically examine products and ideas through an environmental lens that I learned at Bates have translated into the world of architecture and design in a powerful way. The research team I’m co-leading at Gensler recently won a Gensler Research Institute grant to quantify both embodied and operational carbon in our portfolio of work first in the northeast region and eventually at a larger scale across the firm. I credit the systems thinking skills I learned at Bates to much of the conception and execution of my role in this research effort.

Although I experimented with other majors my first year at Bates, I found it easy to commit to an Environmental Studies major my sophomore year. In the back of my head, I knew I wasn’t ready for the intensity of architecture school and wanted a well-rounded liberal arts college experience to create a foundational base for me as an adult. This conviction guided me in the classes I took and translated into a major that I tailored around environmental design. My interest in construction and development from an environmental perspective culminated in my thesis, a sustainable retrofit of a house on Frye Street. My role as the office sustainability and design resilience leader for Gensler Boston would not have been possible without my environmental studies experience at Bates. The systems thinking skills and ability to critically examine products and ideas through an environmental lens that I learned at Bates have translated into the world of architecture and design in a powerful way. The research team I’m co-leading at Gensler recently won a Gensler Research Institute grant to quantify both embodied and operational carbon in our portfolio of work first in the northeast region and eventually at a larger scale across the firm. I credit the systems thinking skills I learned at Bates to much of the conception and execution of my role in this research effort.

The most rewarding aspect of being an environmental studies major at Bates was seeing new perspectives on our society. Be it envisioning the opportunities of renewable energy or understanding the perspectives of Indigenous Wabanaki people, the consistent thread throughout my studies was opening my eyes to possibilities and hidden realities of our world. Environmental problems are complex and require a level of thinking that is objectively outside of our individual perspectives to solve things like climate change, environmental injustice, resource inequity, and more.

I have many fond memories of the department, all of them centered around people. Specifically, Jane Costlow, Sonja Pieck, Joe Hall, and John Smedley had a substantial impact on my thinking by challenging me to see the world differently. I took an environmental leadership course during which we went to Shortridge to build team-building skills. There was a climbing rope across one of the nearby ponds and we were tasked with working as a team to belay each other on a rope across the pond and back. There were a lot of Environmental Studies majors there, and I remember getting halfway across but then the rope got stuck and I was dangling there for fifteen minutes! During a Short Term class, Wabanaki History in Maine, Joe Hall brought us to Native American reservations in Maine. My eyes were opened to the reality of environmental injustice through first-hand experience. The morning after our stay at a hotel in Bangor for a study trip, I started playing Journey on the piano in the lobby. We heard someone singing the lyrics in a distant corner of the hotel. As it grew louder, we saw Joe Hall belting Journey on his way down the stairway in the middle of the lobby!

There is simplicity in doing what you love. My passion for making things started small and slowly grew with a consistent investment of time and effort. Take one small step at a time. Find something you love to do and keep doing it as often as you can. Passion coupled with serving others and relevance has an even greater impact on society. I believe that the most crucial existential threat facing our world is climate change. Our generation has the monumental task of combating climate change in front of us, which can be overwhelming. There aren’t many people who both see the problem and have the ability to make a difference. People who graduate from Bates with an Environmental Studies degree have both of those things. We can use the privilege of an education at Bates to make a lasting impact on our global environment for people and the planet. It’s important to realize that you have more power than you may think to create change, especially when you work in a group of people. There’s a quote from Bobby Kennedy that goes, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples to build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance”. Our generation can alter the status quo by envisioning and implementing new paradigms to create lasting change. Let’s step up to this challenge and create a better world.