What policy areas did you focus on as a student?
Environmental and water resource policy
What policy areas became your focus post-degree?
Environmental, water resources, and climate policy
What is your current position?
Climate hazards planning educator for UW-Madison’s Division of Extension
What type of work do you do in this position?
We are working on developing extreme weather preparedness capacity in rural communities across Wisconsin. That will include leveraging the growing resources of the Wisconsin State Climatologist Office and expanding the network of Mesonet weather monitoring stations to deliver climate information and data to stakeholders in rural Wisconsin to improve their ability to prepare for and respond to extreme weather.
An example of our programming includes working with county emergency managers to better understand their workflows and technical capacity limitations in extreme weather preparedness. That engagement will result in the co-production of locally-relevant tools and resources that support their work.
How have you gotten from La Follette to where you are now?
Following my graduation from La Follette, I stayed on for one more semester to finish a second master’s degree in water resources management through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. I then started a fellowship with Wisconsin Sea Grant and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, where I piloted and improved a flood resilience assessment tool called with Wisconsin Flood Resilience Scorecard. I continued that fellowship through a successful grant award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop greater flood preparedness capacity in northeast Wisconsin coastal cities. I simultaneously held a position with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension developing a tool for states to evaluate their policies related to natural infrastructure to benefit water quality and quantity. I have been working with UW-Extension on a project to develop extreme weather preparedness capacity in rural Wisconsin communities since May 2024. Outside of my role with Extension, I provide GIS and communications support to a nonprofit that helps rural, under-resourced communities across the country access water and wastewater funding.
How have you used what you learned during your time at La Follette on the job?
The client-facing projects, including timely production of project deliverables iteratively produced with feedback of the client, were the most important for my professional development. La Follette’s interdisciplinary positioning at the university also afforded me the opportunity to take courses in other departments that I would otherwise be unable to take.
What courses did you take during your time at La Follette that have most contributed to you becoming a success in your current career?
Despite not being a law student, this course was made available to me through La Follette. The course provided a valuable education on water regulations in the United States and the various ways in which water quality and quantity are treated by the law.
GEOG/CIV ENGR/ENVIR ST 377: An Introduction to Geographic Information SystemsThis was one of the most practical, hand-on courses I took while at La Follette and it provided me with enough of a foundation in GIS that I was then able to teach myself additional skills within the software. In my first role after La Follette, I developed a database of flood indicators at scale for more than 600 communities in Wisconsin using spatial data. The resulting Wisconsin Flood Resilience Scorecard – Data Companions are still among my most practical and valuable policy products I’ve created. I credit GIS as one of the main reasons I have a job today.
I had no business being in this course because I was not an engineering student and lacked a background in engineering, but being a La Follette student again afforded me the ability to take a course that would otherwise be unavailable to me. I struggled in the course learning concepts in calculus and fluid mechanics on the fly, but this foundation in water resources engineering and hydrogeography has since set me apart from other environmental policy professionals. The difficulty of the course is directly proportional to the value I got from it.
This course was among the practical and valuable client-facing projects where we developed a benefit-cost analysis for manure management in northeast Wisconsin. Most importantly, the course taught me how to address uncertainty in quantitative analysis and communicating that uncertainty appropriately. The publication of a long-form report and defense of those findings before a public audience continues to be a component of my work today.
What was the most impactful part of your La Follette education?
I credit much of my work style today to Dr. Geoffrey Wallace, who helped me develop the muscle to figure things out myself, which makes me a more independent and productive employee. He would stand before our Econometrics class and casually admit that he didn’t know some basic STATA operations, instead having to look them up. That frustrated some of my classmates, but I appreciated that he exemplified what I find to be the most important quality in a coworker – that having the skillset to find an answer quickly is so much more valuable than having a handful of things memorized.