Allison NewRingeisen (ELP 2024) | Undergraduate Student, Texas Christian University, United States

When I first heard about the ELP program from Professor David Zilberman, it sounded like a dream opportunity. Where else would I be able to train in multiple environmental and climate change centered topics as well as leadership and conflict management? Unfortunately, this program was built for mid-career professionals, and I am a current third year at an undergraduate university. I was able to have a zoom meeting with Mio Katayama Owens, the director of the program and Associate Dean where she introduced me to the Junior Leaders Program. I would enter the ELP program as a junior participant and be able to attend every session, collaborate with my colleagues, network with the lecturers who visited, and receive a certificate of sustainable environmental leadership. I was intimidated to walk-in on the first day, wondering if people would see me as young and naive, but the opposite happened. Everyone was welcoming, asked me interesting questions, allowed me to ask them about their path, and genuinely wanted to hear about my story and help me narrow in on a focus point within climate change.

This program has had an instrumental impact on my career trajectory, being able to meet so many new people, all of whom have different careers and interesting topics studied. Throughout the three weeks of the program, I was able to hear stories from different participants and through this I realized just how many issues there are to solve within the climate sphere. With my background in political science, I was able to enter this program from a policy and economics perspective, and through collaborative group work with my cohort, we were able to analyze case studies to come up with environmental law and policy solutions for a few problems across the world. I have come to the realization that I want to make an environmental impact through policy and continue my education in graduate school. I am so thankful to every person who took the time to talk to me throughout the program and am grateful for the opportunity to attend this program as a junior leader.

[The blog post image was published on Wikipedia Commons. Original image by Alex Bakharev. The copyright holder has published this content under the following licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.]