From the coastlines of New England to small communities in rural Wisconsin, two University of Rhode Island alumni took an unexpected leap to the national stage over the summer.
For Mallory Lentz ’23 and Alex Pouliot ’23, both graduates from URI’s master of environmental science and management program, an application to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office for Coastal Management Fellowships quickly transformed into an experience that has helped to shape the beginning of their professional careers.
“I didn’t think I had the background,” Lentz said. “I don’t call the fellowship prestigious, but it’s a fellowship. It’s something I hadn’t really gone for before…I didn’t think I was going to get it, but as soon as I saw that email, I was like, ‘oh my gosh.’”
The fellowship, which narrowed down a national pool of 37 applicants to just nine recipients, involved a rigorous three-month application process of written submissions, essays and interviews, according to Lentz. After being selected in March as one of 18 to attend the final interview process in Charleston, South Carolina, Lentz eventually matched with her first-choice project based out of Hartford, Connecticut.
The Connecticut project was one of nine two-year, environmentally-centered projects based in different areas from around the country that were up for selection in Charleston. Representatives from each project interviewed the 18 finalists that attended the matching workshop. Through a three-day interview period, Pouliot was also selected for her top-choice project, which will run for two years and began in August.
“I went that week and there were so many cool people,” Pouliot said. “It was fascinating because I’ve been in places like that before where you feel like, ‘oh god, I am not enough, I don’t have the experience, I don’t have whatever the background is.’ But the other fellows were just so incredibly welcoming and kind that we all just sort of instantly bonded.”
Although Pouliot said the feeling was “nuts,” her selection as a finalist was not the end of the road, as 50% of the attendees would still leave Charleston empty-handed. Despite the stakes, the comradery Pouliot and Lentz shared with the group of scholars turned tight competition into a close-knit friendship.
“It was just really funny, random, a bunch of basically 20-year-olds in Charleston for the first time exploring and enjoying each other’s company,” Pouliot said. “They are friendships that I will keep for a while. That was a really wonderful experience that made the stress of the interviews and all of that much more worth it.”
While Lentz stayed closer to home in Connecticut, Pouliot’s selection took her to Madison, Wisconsin – more than 1,000 miles from the shores of the Ocean State. There, she works to research and improve flood mitigation strategies in local communities.
Pouliot struggled to find a hands on, “boots on the ground” job post-graduation that suited her passion, and filled in as a local substitute teacher to make extra money in the meantime. Eventually, the opportunity to apply for the NOAA fellowship gave Pouliot vital direction and experience directly out of graduation, according to Pouliot.
“[The fellowship] was pretty random and out there, but I said, ‘hey, you know, if this works, it’s a professional development experience,” Pouliot said. “I get two years of real project experience, project management under my belt, and then I can go out. One of the most appealing things is that they talk about the fact that the people who have done this fellowship tend to get jobs coming out of it.”
For Lentz, whose project focuses on environmental communications, her fellowship brought her an unexpected sense of clarity for the future that otherwise would have been difficult to find.
“It was very surreal,” Lentz said. “In the meantime, between waiting for that email to come through, I was applying to all these different jobs… I was trying to just get anything I could for after graduation.”
With an additional two years of support, Mallory and Lentz have time to transform their passions into careers and navigate the professional, post-graduation world.