Amanda Farthing (MS/MSE ’21), who graduated from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) with a dual degree in engineering, says she wants to help students interested in pursuing a similar path understand the relevance and impact of sustainability work.
“The lessons and the frameworks that are taught at SEAS for thinking about how society can reduce its environmental impacts are crucial knowledge at this point. I want to encourage future students coming through SEAS to feel empowered and to feel like they are doing really important work,” says Farthing.
At SEAS, she specialized in Sustainable Systems and, since graduating, has built an impactful career in the renewable energy sector. Over the years, she has held several sustainability roles and is currently a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
As an undergraduate student at Clemson University, Farthing worked as a sustainable development intern at the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C., which served as her introduction to thinking about engineering and project planning through a sustainability lens. She spent another summer interning for NREL in their Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program.
After receiving her bachelor’s in industrial engineering, Farthing was awarded a Fulbright research opportunity to study community solar in Santiago, Chile.
“While I was down there researching this topic, they actually implemented enabling legislation for community solar, so it was a really exciting time to be there,” says Farthing.
After this experience, Farthing decided to pursue a master’s degree at SEAS, where she says she found the exact type of program she was looking for to enhance her career. She says it was well set up to allow her to develop the skills she needed.
"When I was looking at several different graduate programs that I was interested in, SEAS stood out, especially because of the dual degree program," says Farthing. “My perspective was that I had done an industrial engineering undergrad degree, and I wanted to continue to develop both my engineering and qualitative skill sets, specifically in the realm of renewable energy systems. So I wanted to keep down the engineering path—getting a little bit more specific to my topic of interest, but I also wanted to gain skills outside of engineering related to this topic.”
While at SEAS, Farthing completed another summer internship, this time at RMI on their Cities & Communities team. In this internship, Farthing discovered that she really enjoyed working on tasks that aided in the implementation process.
Farthing chose the thesis option for her SEAS Capstone, an independent research project that inspired a re-connection with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Her thesis, Integrating climate, health, resilience, and bill savings into the cost-optimal deployment of solar plus storage on public buildings, explored how our decision-making would change if we were to fully account for the emissions and resilience impacts of distributed energy investment decisions.
Advised by Michael Craig and Tony Reames, her research used NREL’s REopt: Renewable Energy Integration and Optimization tool, which is an open-source data optimization tool for on-site energy systems. Because it is open-source, Farthing says she “could modify the underlying code base and add in additional considerations that were part of my research question.”
Working on this tool allowed her to communicate with the NREL team, who worked directly on REopt, and she shared her final results with them.
“At the end of my graduate program, I applied to work for that team, and I now work on that team and use this model every day,” Farthing says. “It was a really nice segue from my master’s thesis work directly into a job where I continue to do similar work using the same model.”
Farthing says the skills and knowledge she gained during her dual-degree education inform her work daily.
“I draw from my engineering education to do these very quantitative or techno-economic analyses to be able to provide a technically solid solution around distributed energy deployment,” says Farthing.
From the SEAS side, “being able to think about the non-engineering aspects of the solution, having the soft skills necessary to communicate with external clients, and having the background to think in a systems context about how the solutions that you’re proposing may have knock-on effects” is often drawn on.