This summer, Kiersten Sundell ’25 is bringing her talents to NASA as part of the aeronautical agency’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), a program that allows students to work with NASA scientists and study Earth systems processes aboard the agency’s research aircraft. A triple major in environmental science and management, political science, and wildlife and conservation biology, Sundell is passionate about the environment and addressing the global climate crisis.
Q. What about your upcoming NASA internship are you most excited for?
A. I’m really excited to fly in a plane. SARP is a program in Los Angeles that allows students to be sorted into four different categories at random: Atmospheric Aerosol, Whole Air Sampling, Ocean Remote Sensing, and Terrestrial Ecology. You fly in the planes and conduct research from the air, such as remote sensing data, outside air sampling, etc. That’s an opportunity not available at URI or at most other universities, so I’m really excited to do this because it gives you practical research skills for intensive fields like physics and aeronautics.
Who will you be working with, and what will you be doing?
Students will work with a NASA scientist research mentor assigned to each of the teams, and you’ll then develop your own research project based on the data your team collects. I would love to be on the Ocean Remote Sensing team, given that’s much of URI’s roots and there’s a huge ocean program through GSO. If on that team, I would like to study the impacts of LA-based air pollution on ocean air chemistry off the coast. I’m interested in pursuing environmental science through climate change, and city pollution is one of the biggest drivers of climate change and impacts much of our ecosystems.
What motivated you to pursure a triple major during your time at URI?
I was always interested in environmental science because I want to do everything I can to help solve the climate crisis. I see it as three ways to tackle this problem: a purely research lens, communications, and creating policy. Around my senior year of high school, I chose the policy route and wanted to go into some kind of environmental regulatory field. When I first came to URI, I had declared my major in environmental science and management, but after my first year, I then added a major in political science. In my environmental science classes at URI, I started learning about wildlife – not just the side of environmental science focused on metrics of the environment, but also learning about biodiversity. I took a field botany class and we learned about 150 different types of native plants, including their Latin names, characteristics, and ways to identify them. Then I started learning about mammalian and avian diversity, and I realized I was very interested in this too – maybe not from a career standpoint, but just for fun. The CELS department made it possible for me to add my third major in wildlife and conservation biology to the two I already had, which I really appreciate. That’s an opportunity that not many students in other colleges at URI can do so easily.
How did your majors help prepare you to take on this internship?
A lot of my environmental science classes gave me practical field research skills, such as sampling how much carbon is in the soil, or calculating how big is a forest stand, etc., and that allows you to understand how much carbon the trees can sequester from the air. I’ve worked on carbon accounting efforts through the Student Action for Sustainability (SAS) group and helped push the university to do annual greenhouse gas emissions surveys and make those available for students. So I got to do a lot of activism through that group. In my political science classes, we learned to make big databases and analyze that data using programs like R Script. The combination of my majors has given me the skills to be able to conduct this kind of research, in a way that puts me next to even a physics or atmospheric chemistry major, which is really cool because I don’t think a lot of environmental science programs have opportunities for students where your field research experience is baked into your coursework.
What advice would you share with other students considering a career in sustainability, energy, climate policy, or related fields?
My number one piece of advice: Go to office hours! When you’re a senior, you have to apply for a lot of jobs, and you’ll need a set of references for each of them. If you don’t work to make strong and sustained relationships with your professors and other staff, you’re not going to be able to have those strong references that will get you these jobs in the future.
Really prioritize getting jobs and internships during college. If you’re waiting until your senior year to start looking for a real-life learning opportunity, there will be students that have more experience than you. I was able to get an internship at an international NGO my freshman year, and that job taught me a lot about clean energy and the politics, finances, and communications behind clean energy and environmental science. It has given me a bunch of sequential opportunities that eventually led to me being viewed as a prime candidate for a job. Get as many real-life learning opportunities as you can while you’re in school.
Lastly, apply for jobs, even those that you think you’re not qualified for. It’s really about how you’re able to prove yourself by creating human connections and relating your past experiences to what you can do for an employer in the future, even if you don’t have every qualification on paper.
What are your plans for after graduation and after the internship?
First, I plan to complete this internship in LA. Then, for the fall, I’ve been applying to positions in the D.C. area that are centered around environmental policy. I plan to work for an NGO in some sort of policy work for a year, then apply to graduate schools on the west coast. I’d like to get into an environmental policy graduate program.
~ Organized by CELS Communications Fellow Yvonne Wingard