Nature & Nurture | Giving News

Energy and Environment Experience Boosts Students’Careers

From the popularity of an original short course on energy and the environment, to a seminar on clean electricity from sustainable energy technologies, student interest has been the driving force behind the creation of the Nicholas School Energy and Environment Program.

Recently, two of the first graduates of the Energy and Environment Certificate Program shared their thoughts on the importance of this program and its value as they launch their careers.

Lena Hansen MEM’05 was the first student to earn an Energy and Environment Certificate to complement her Master of Environment Management concentration in environmental economics and policy. She was a key organizer of the Nicholas Leadership Forum “Creating a Sustainable Energy Future,” the March 2004 event that kicked off the creation of the Energy and Environment program, and created a seminar on renewable energy.

“I came into the Nicholas School planning to do urban design and smart growth,” she says. “My first semester, I took an air quality class that touched on energy issues, and it piqued my interest. Then I had the opportunity to take Simon Rich’s class. It was fantastic, particularly because the teacher was a practitioner in the field and had a lot of real world experience, so he could make the problems much more real.”

(Simon Rich, Nicholas School Board of Visitors chair and a former energy executive, started the course in Spring 2003. See Dukenvironment story here > .)

By the time she had helped design the energy forum, Hansen’s interest in a career in the energy field was cemented. “Energy is such a huge, pervasive problem. It’s very multidisciplinary, and very few schools have tackled it from a multidisciplinary perspective. Duke is one of the first to do that, and that’s really exciting. Because of the nature of the Nicholas School and the resources available across the Duke campus in business, law, policy and engineering, this school really is well placed to address this issue.”

Hansen now works at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a nonprofit organization based in Snowmass, Colo., that conducts research and consulting projects on sustainability issues. She interned in RMI’s Hawaii office last year as part of the Stanback Internship Program, then joined the energy team in Snowmass after graduating. Hansen’s main focus is on electric utility policy and helping companies understand how to integrate renewable energy into their systems. Last year, she helped RMI write a book, Winning the Oil End Game, on how the United States can profitably substantially decrease or eliminate its consumption of oil in the next 20 years.

Scott Weaver completed the Energy and Environment Certificate Program with the program’s first class in May 2005, also graduating with an MEM with a concentration in environmental economics and policy.

“I always saw myself working in an industry such as energy, and I had a particular interest in the environmental side of energy production,” he says. “When the certificate program came up, I thought it was a good opportunity for me to get some background and have something on my resume related to the energy sector. Last summer, I interned as a strategic policy analyst at American Electric Power (AEP), and I found that the Energy and Environment curriculum supplemented what I learned there.”

Last fall, through the Energy and Environment Certificate Program’s course in hydrocarbon production and policy, Weaver took part in a field trip to Houston, the epicenter of the world’s energy industry. Students spent four days touring oil refineries and chemical plants and peppering plant managers with questions about their operations. “AEP is a large electric power producer, so this trip gave me a chance to see the oil and gas side of energy production.”

Following graduation Weaver was hired back by AEP as a full-time strategic policy analyst in their Columbus, Ohio, headquarters. He is responsible for running AEP’s environmental compliance optimization model, which shows how the company can best meet environmental requirements, and for providing analysis surrounding current environmental issues that face AEP and the energy industry. His boss, Bruce H. Braine, participated in the Nicholas Leadership Forum last year.

Though the Energy and Environment Certificate Program, Weaver says he learned a lot about the industry and its environmental implications. “The general knowledge I picked up in the program will definitely help me professionally. I’m a step ahead of what they’d expect out of most people coming into this type of position, as far as my knowledge of the energy industry.”

—Laura Ertel