Grace Rau ’24, Climate Resiliency Planner for Weston & Sampson (2024 Environmental Conservation and Sustainability major) reflects on how she harnessed her passion and gained skills and experience through her UNH sustainability education to land a job of impact.
UNHSI: Why and how did you get involved in sustainability?
Grace: Ever since I was in middle school, I've known what field I wanted to be in – all I cared about was climate change and being a part of the solution. At UNH, I transferred in and did some outside research on sustainability at the university, I then found the Sustainability Institute, which completely changed my life. I would not be where I am today without the people, the programs, and the real-world experiences they provided.
UNHSI: You repeated the Climate Action Clinic a few times – tell us about your biggest take aways from those experiences.
Grace: Truthfully, I found it fascinating and enjoyed working with data. I was able to learn a completely NEW skill – this is something that is not taught in a regular classroom and it's a growing field. I found that this could be something I'd be interested in pursuing in the future, so I wanted to stick with it and build my professional skills. The most important skills I’ve been able to apply would be: data manipulation, scaling and proportions for datasets that are not straightforward (In other words, what is the best way to represent this data and pull in other datasets to show an estimate of xyz). This is a skill that I've applied in multiple situations in the work that I am doing now.
UNHSI: Tell us about your current job; what do you love about it, what are some challenges and how do you navigate them?
Grace: I work for Weston & Sampson as a Climate Resiliency Planner in the Portsmouth, NH office with frequent trips to the Reading HQ office to meet with my team. Currently, I have been working on Comprehensive Climate Action Plans for municipalities – this being MAPC region (120+ Massachusetts Towns and Southern NH towns), Worcester (all Worcester County towns and a few Northern CT towns), Southwest CT (Fairfield County). We are currently wrapping up the "Greenhouse Gas Inventory" phase where we are pulling all data for each of these towns. After this, we will be conducting community surveys, quantification measures, and more (still learning what's next!). This has been extremely eye-opening and the Climate Action Clinic has definitely prepared me for municipality data and GHG analysis. A challenge is that I have only worked with businesses on GHG work, so the protocols and steps are a bit different. I am simply just taking in all the knowledge that I can, taking lots of notes, and asking questions when needed!
UNHSI: What excites you and what gives you hope about working in a sustainability job today?
Grace:
- Excites: There is so much more work to be done - GHG inventories are about less than 10 years old in this emerging field (assuming that 8-10 years ago, GHG inventories started to ramp up) so I am grateful to be a part of this emerging field!
- Hope: Eye-opening to see a hefty number of students, young professionals, engineers, leaders in this field.
I think politics can play a role in this, but the community and resources are growing at such an exponential rate, I believe that we can be resilient to political concerns versus a decade ago.
UNHSI: What advice do you have for current students as they think about their time at UNH and beyond?
Grace:
Throw yourself at any opportunity you can get! Diversify WHAT opportunities you throw yourself in (I was a sales rep for a year and found that I enjoy being with people, but maybe not sales itself). Go to those conferences, events, travel – you will build professional relationships and confidence.
