Alumni Spotlight
Rachel Mak
Alumni Spotlight
Rachel Mak
TEAK Class: 3
High School: Phillips Exeter
College: Harvard University
Graduate School: Yale University
Profession: Environmental Sustainability Consultant
On Saturday, January 6th, The TEAK Fellowship hosted its first annual College Success Summit, an action-packed day of guest speakers, workshops, and panels geared at helping TEAK college students prepare for their next steps. We were honored to hear from Rachel Mak who spoke about her experience in TEAK and her journey since. Here are the personal and professional life lessons that she has learned so far which she shared with students at the Summit:
Life lesson one: “Your path to wherever career you end up with might be messy, and that’s totally fine. Let me give some context to this by explaining how I grew up. I grew up with a mom who can only be lovingly described as a “tiger mom” and my “tiger mom” told me that I could be one of two things when I grew up – a doctor or a lawyer. I was fine with this and with my type A personality, I thought I would exceed expectations and be a doctor-lawyer. And that dream had a linear path, I would go to high school, then college, then med school, then law school and then, bam! I would become a doctor-lawyer. That dream ended when I cut myself falling off my bike and realized I was extremely squeamish around blood. So, I was left with the only option of being a lawyer. And again, achieving that dream was pretty linear and non-messy – I figured I would go to law school after college. When it came time to take on a summer internship, I told TEAK I was interested in law and TEAK placed me at a law firm for the summer. Much to my disappointment, I realized I did not enjoy law or the law firm culture. I was 16 at the time so I figured law would still be viable career option, I’ll just learn to like it eventually and to top it off, there was nothing else I found that I could get really passionate about.
Then I went to Exeter for high school and things changed. As you guys know, TEAK has a volunteer requirement so in my effort to fulfill my volunteer requirement, I signed up to clean up litter on beaches and highways with the rational that I really like cleaning so picking up litter when cars are zooming at 80 miles per hour around you would be fun. And you know what? It really was! I loved learning about what I was doing was making an actual difference. We were preventing litter from going into the waterways and also preventing animals from ingesting the litter and getting harmed in the process. With that, I started taking environmental science classes and joining sustainability clubs around campus. I finally found something I was passionate about. My tiger mom though, was less passionate about my new found passion. I remember calling her from school and telling her about my latest field trip to observe some old growth forests and she interrupted me with, “But you’re still going to be a lawyer, right?” She said, “If you do environmental stuff, you’ll just end up being a hippie and hugging trees and won’t make any money.” Now, this fear of not having money always scared me. We as TEAK fellows understand what it’s like to grow up without having much and I knew I didn’t want that for my future. So I told her, “Yes, I’m going to be a lawyer but a lawyer that volunteers to pick up litter on the weekends.”
At this point in time, I was gearing up to go to college and was thinking about what I wanted to major in and what I wanted to do career-wise and honestly, I was really freaking out. I had given the law firm another chance and interned there again for a second summer and still thought the world of law just didn’t resonate with me. I really didn’t want to spend my whole career doing something I didn’t truly love. At that point, I reached out to a teacher I really liked for advice which leads me to…
Life lesson 2: Ask for help. Share your feelings. There are so many people who have a wealth of life experience and advice to give. And these people are all around you – professors, advisors at school, classmates, relatives, and TEAK staff. And my teacher did give me great advice. She showed me, what I thought, was a magical website called glassdoor.com and provided me with actual salary data of how much people working in the environmental field would make and talked to me about different career options I could pursue in the environmental field. Armed with that knowledge, I went on to Harvard and majored in Environmental Science and Public Policy.
When it came time for me to graduate from college, I knew I wanted to get a job in the environmental/sustainability field but a part of me was still scared that I couldn’t earn a reasonable salary in that field so in a last minute, panicked decision, I decided to accept a job in the finance field with a mergers and acquisitions firm. For those of you who don’t know what that is, mergers and acquisitions is basically just helping companies partner or buy other companies. The pay was good and I got to move to China and travel a lot. Looking back, this was a huge digression from my interests and eventual career path but I’m glad I did it because it made me realize how important it was to stay true to my interests.
Life lesson three: Stay true to your interests. After a few months of working in finance, I realized that it was unhealthy to be working long hours at a job that made me feel so unfulfilled. It just didn’t seem right to spend 75% of my waking hours on a job that didn’t make me happy. So with that, I decided to apply to graduate school and get an advanced degree that would help me obtain a job in the environmental field.
I wound up going to Yale for graduate school and getting my degree in environmental management. But in another surprising, non-linear turn of events, I found myself longing for the finance acumen I had picked up in China. I was really passionate about talking to people about reducing their carbon footprint, implementing energy efficiency changes, and reducing their waste but found that my message wasn’t effective until I could translate these actions into actual cost savings incentives. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, stop using so much electricity because that’s what’s good for the earth”. It’s more effective to say, “Hey, it would be awesome if you stopped using so much electricity because that’s what’s good for the earth AND you’ll save this much money in the process.” So with that, I went on to attend Yale’s business school and get my MBA to really hone those financial skills that I thought would be necessary to round out my environmental skill set. Which leads me to…
Life lesson four: Be flexible and creative with how you pursue your eventual career goals. You have the luxury and resources to cobble together different programs to create an education that really helps you reach your specific career goals.
At this point, I know one thing you guys might be thinking of here in how this applies to you is the financial barrier of all of this. Graduate school is super expensive and most of us don’t have parents to bankroll an education that might not lead to a career that is extremely lucrative. But that doesn’t have to be a barrier. There are scholarships for different types of programs and part-time jobs available. I did graduate with some students loans but I was able to pay off a majority of these loans while I was in graduate school – I took on some odd jobs and worked as a teaching assistant throughout my time at Yale. And when it does come time to graduate, you’ll be surprised to find that some universities have student loan forgiveness programs if you decide to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector and that other jobs that will pay well enough to help you pay back your student loans within a reasonable timeframe. And on the plus side, you could be doing all of this while you’re working at a job that you are passionate about and find meaningful.
As an example, after graduate school, I got a job working as a sustainability consultant for an environmental firm called Industrial Economics in Boston. And I LOVE my job. Depending on the client, I get to do a number of interesting and impactful things each week. I’ve helped clients create statewide environmental policies, strategize ways to reduce their carbon emissions, and create models that calculate the environmental impact of products and then identify ways to decrease the environmental impact of these products without compromising functionality. I’ve helped the EPA determine performance metrics to track progress in cleaning up polluted city waterways. I’m currently helping another client figure out how much food waste is generated nationally and come up with national-level strategies to reduce this food waste, divert them from landfills, and use this waste to create compost and electricity. I’m also helping another client figure out how to get people in Massachusetts and New York to drive less and take public transit instead to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. To me, my job is challenging, meaningful, and fulfilling, and most importantly, I look forward to going to work every day. To top it off, I make a good salary and did not, as my mother feared, end up living in a tree without any money.
Before I end, I wanted to note that what you do in your advanced education, should you decide to pursue graduate school, a career is only going to be one part of your life after college.
Life lesson number 5: Make sure your job is not your life and make time to do interesting things that are important to you. Shortly after college, I started dating what I can only describe was a crazy guy who had a lot of unconventional ideas of what life could be like outside of work. (As a side note, I eventually ended up marrying this crazy guy.) Anyway, he was an engineer and decided to quit his job to bicycle from Singapore, which is in Asia, all the way, to Prague, which is in Europe. (See, I told you this guy was crazy.) When he first told me about his plan, I remember laughing and thinking that he was insane and never going to go through with it. But to my surprise, he did! And to my even bigger surprise, I was so inspired by his spirit to tackle something so wonderfully brave and unconventional, that I ended up joining him for the summer and biked from China to Kazakhstan with him. It was such a humbling experience to bike through areas and see how people in remote areas of developing countries live. I was constantly astounded by everyone’s kindness. These were people who didn’t have a lot but wouldn’t hesitate to let two unshowered, smelly bicyclists into their home for some conversation in broken Chinese and English and a snack.
Eventually, he reached Prague, flew back home to America, and moved with me to Boston. We decided to get married and also decided that the city wasn’t for us. Living in the city wasn’t satisfying and we wanted something more – we wanted to grow our own food and live in a more rural area. The hardest part about this was the job factor. Everyone needs money to survive but rural areas aren’t exactly well-known for their plethora of job opportunities. But, with some creativity, we were able to finagle arrangements with our jobs so that we could keep working but move to a more rural area. I now work remotely and travel to Boston once a week and he ended up opening another branch of the solar installation company he worked for in Boston in an area around where we live now. More importantly, we were able to forge a life where we grow our own vegetables and have pear trees, apple trees, and peach trees, started a beehive and harvest our own honey, tap maple trees to boil our own maple syrup, and are now designing our chicken coop so we can get chickens in the spring. We’ve got hundreds of acres of woods right behind our house and enjoy spending weekends hiking new trails and identifying trees. And like life at work, life outside of work is challenging but also constantly fulfilling and meaningful.
So with that, I hope you find these life lessons helpful. I know as TEAK fellows, you face a unique pressure. Most of you will be the first in your family to graduate from college and there is this pressure to make a lot of money and support your parents. But my point in this long-winded speech is that there is no one traditional way of achieving this. If you find yourself passionate about law, medicine, or finance, that’s awesome and you should pursue that for your career. But if you find yourself being mesmerized with something different – photography, drama, teaching, graphic design, whatever it is – that’s awesome too and there are definitely ways to make a viable career out of these interests.
You guys are all different and will certainly have personal and career interests that are different from mine and the other people that will be speaking and serving on the panels today. Some of your career options you’ll want to pursue may require or benefit from graduate school and an advanced degree, others may not. But don’t be afraid to share what you want to pursue today and ask for advice and contacts in those areas to figure out how to get there. Chances are, we all know someone that can offer advice. Don’t be afraid to explore and figure out what you are interested in and take non-linear, non-traditional paths in doing so. Find something that you love and as TEAK fellows, you have the resources and network available to you to make a great, meaningful, and financially fulfilling career and personal life out of your passions.”
Get in touch with Rachel: [email protected] or LinkedIn