Alumna Ally Mark Embraces Curiosity
When Ally Mark ‘20 started her M.S. program, she felt like a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Over time, she found that the Civil & Environmental Engineering program encompassed diverse topics that gave her a wide-ranging perspective on the environment.
She’s let the knowledge she gained from her interdisciplinary classes and her senior capstone inspire her in the professional world, and she recommends that current students “indulge their curiosity.”
Q&A
Why did you choose Northwestern to pursue your degrees?
I chose Northwestern because I wanted to surround myself with people who were multidimensional and brilliant in different fields. Northwestern excels at cultivating both researchers and practitioners, artists and scientists, writers and engineers—and sometimes in the same student. I love that students at Northwestern hold many identities at once and I think that can lead to better conversations and broader perspectives. That diversity of thought, skill, and practice really shapes how I approach my work and career.
Can you recall a moment from your time at Northwestern that impacted or inspired you?
It’s so hard to pick just one, and it’s also hard not to pick my study abroad trip to South Africa. During the fifth year of my BS/MS program, Professor Gray managed to sneak me and one other CEE colleague onto a biomedical engineering senior capstone quarter abroad, where we would work on a similar project but take the more environmental public health angle to the BMEs’ health systems perspective.
Our environmental engineering project ended up much more interdisciplinary than strictly environmental engineering and I loved it. The project sought to assess the efficacy and feasibility of an internal water security policy proposal from the City of Cape Town. The City was fresh off of their dramatic, global headlines-seizing Day Zero scare, which was the estimated date for when the City would run out of water—it was narrowly averted due to some unexpected rains. As a result, City officials were scrambling for opportunities to augment their existing drinking water supply and someone suggested collecting and treating stormwater.
To clarify, Cape Town was not our client; rather, we worked with a quirky professor emeritus of the University of Stellenbosch named Jo Barnes to scope the project. We conducted a desktop analysis of the City’s water policies and legal framework, the potential volume of collectible stormwater, and the cost of adding City-scale infrastructure for stormwater collection and wastewater treatment, then collected and analyzed stormwater samples to determine the level of treatment required to bring the City’s stormwater up to drinking water quality. The project really crystallized for me the need for people capable of bridging the gap between science and policy to be inside those rooms where decisions are made.
What advice would you give to prospective students?
I recommend that prospective students indulge their curiosity, even if they don’t know where it will lead! I remember feeling pressure to figure out what my one true passion was so I could put my whole self into something. In reality, I found myself interested and excited about too many things at Northwestern, and I realized that the University values and seeks these types of students, too. At Northwestern, I also loved all my non-engineering classes, and I learned that different academic disciplines speak different languages and cultivate vastly different research approaches and methods. Even if I never “use” the knowledge from those classes, I still carry with me the understanding that the people I encounter in the academic and professional worlds all bring diverse backgrounds, training, and perspectives.
How do you feel that the CEE program prepared you for the professional world?
The CEE program encompassed a diversity of topics and disciplines that gave me a wide-ranging perspective on why and how the environment looks the way it does today. Environmental engineering is so broad that I often felt during school that I was becoming a jack of all trades but a master of none. However, in the professional world, I realized that my background has enabled me to excel in my role as a generalist. I understand the basics and can speak to experts in many different fields intelligently enough to get the information I need for my projects. For example, my senior capstone project forced me to learn the basics of building energy modeling so I could create a high-level model of the team’s building; today, I work on multiple projects centered on energy codes, electrification, and building performance!
What would you say is the biggest challenge you faced after graduating, and how did you overcome it?
Northwestern undoubtedly prepares its students well for the professional world, so I would say the biggest challenge I faced after graduating was adjusting to the post-college social life. I had taken for granted that, for all my life up to that point, I was constantly surrounded by friends simply by going to school. These friends were instrumental to my success in school, from learning algebra in middle school to doing differential equations problem sets in college. In the workplace, though, the diversity in age and stages of life changes the social environment, and my closest coworkers don’t always work on the same projects. To overcome this, I have joined volunteer organizations, connected with friends of friends, attended social events to broaden my network, and stayed close to my existing friends. I have concluded that this aspect of life may always be a work in progress but that I am not alone in struggling with it.
What is one thing you are passionate about?
Sustainability and climate action professionals, like in most industries, is a field dominated by white folks, especially those who would not be considered disproportionately impacted by climate change under most definitions. In response, I have worked hard over the last couple of years to elevate the formalization of equity and environmental justice lenses in our planning projects. When we win a project to write a community’s climate action plan, we typically deploy the same core workstreams: we conduct a baseline existing conditions analysis and greenhouse gas inventory, create goals, strategies, and actions, work with the public to guide strategy development and prioritization and write up the plan.
We’ve started incorporating “equity guides” which are a deeper dive into a community’s various histories, identities, and socio-environmental vulnerabilities. The intent is to prepare our team for engagement, especially with equity-priority communities, and for prioritizing strategies that seek to improve conditions on the ground. Sometimes that means having tough conversations with our clients, but I believe the lens is critical to ensuring we live up to our climate equity principles and promote a just transition to a low-carbon future.