She Always Thought She'd Go Back for a Master's. She Didn't Need One to Start Her Climate Career.
Before she was interested in climate change or landing a climate job, Lauren Louie was curious about, well, the climate at large. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is known for its microclimates because the weather sometimes seems to shift appreciably as you walk from one neighborhood to the next.
“I took an environmental studies course in high school and said, ‘You know, this is really interesting. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know that I like this,’” Louie told us.
When she left for college at Cal Poly, a few hours to the south, she majored in Earth Sciences and opted for a track focusing on climate change so she could study meteorology. But after graduating, she wasn’t quite sure which direction to take her interests: “I always thought I would go back and get my master’s but I didn’t know what to get it in,” Louie says.
One of her superpowers, it turned out, had to do with collecting and synthesizing data from scientific fieldwork and past reports. From that, she could tease out environmental and financial implications and turn the results into a game plan for action. She had a knack for GIS, or geographic information systems, and one of her first jobs out of college was for an environmental consulting firm.
She wound up working on cleanup sites and focusing on groundwater, but it wasn’t her forever job. “I always knew I wanted to work on climate,” Louie says here, “but I still didn’t know where to start.”
Flash forward a few years. She wound up taking a role in commercial real estate as an underwriter working on multifamily mortgages: “A friend got me into the industry and said ‘What you do with chemistry you can do with dollars. Why don’t you come and look at historical data and compile it and figure out projections?’ And I was like, ‘I could do that.’” Five years went by.
“I always knew that this was a waiting point for me while I applied to other jobs and figured out what I wanted to do in climate—but I didn’t know how to get into the industry,” she says.
The Learning for Action experience
Louie joined various Bay Area professional groups, got a career coach, and tried to figure out how to put her transferable skills down on paper. Along this journey, she wanted to burnish her climate credentials—and didn’t want to go back for a master’s to do it. Eventually, she found her way to Terra.do.
Before signing up, she did her homework: Was the organization credible, would a fellowship be worthwhile? “Almost everyone in my network knew about Terra.do,” she says, and it didn’t hurt that the Learning for Action course allows for full refunds even a couple weeks into the program; if you’re not getting what you wanted out of it, you’re not stuck with it.
“So I signed up. And the course ended up being much more than I expected—it was awesome.” From the first session, Louie says she was learning a lot and getting more out of it than she’d imagined.
Asked what resonated with her about the Learning for Action fellowship (we call it LFA for short), she gives a list that includes the community experience connecting with peers, as well as the ability to do coursework when it was convenient and fit classes in around her work: “I was pretty hesitant about that, like, ‘Can I do this and still keep up with my full-time job?’ And the Learning for Action course is awesome because they record everything; it’s at your own pace.”
Louie says she especially benefited from attending the live weekly lab sessions, which take place with an instructor over Zoom, and are a chance to connect with both local and global peers. Since she graduated from the program in late 2023, the network she built has been an invaluable resource.
A career in climate finance
In early 2024, Louie took a job with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. “The Air District,” as those in the know call it, regulates air quality in the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area; her division is the Technology Implementation Office, where she works on the Climate Tech Finance Program.
“It’s awesome because I feel like I finally found a career that could merge my finance background that I learned from underwriting multifamily mortgages with my interest and passion for climate change and the environment,” she told us this summer. “We do that by de-risking loans for the lender by offering government-backed guarantees for entrepreneurs and startups that have technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and need funding to go from demo to commercialization.”
In other words, if someone has a bright idea that could help limit the worst impacts of climate change, they may need funding to help scale it up. Louie’s work at the Air District helps make such a loan less scary to lenders, by guaranteeing 80 percent of it, up to $5 million. It also does some matchmaking between the people with promising technology and the people who can bankroll them.
“We assist the lenders by actually reviewing the technology to calculate what the greenhouse gas emissions reductions will be, so for the lender we’re proving to them that the technology actually works,” she says.
“This is an interesting challenge for me because it’s definitely a big learning experience,” Louie says—from the language of startups to wonky climate solutions like biochar and carbon dioxide removal. Having some baseline knowledge from taking the Learning for Action program—and being able to revisit past classes and occasionally brush up—has been a big help.
“If you’re curious about how to learn more about climate change or have a career, I highly encourage you to get involved with the Terra.do community,” she says.
What is the LFA fellowship?
Whether you’re looking to do more about climate change at work or to step up climate action in your community, Terra.do’s Learning for Action fellowship is a great place to start.
It’s an all-remote course that’s 12 weeks long (6 to 10 hours a week) and includes a mix of live conversations with instructors and peers alongside asynchronous classes (reading, videos, infographics, optional quizzes). We cover everything from the physical science behind global heating to key solution areas like clean energy and climate finance. Throughout, the class is built to help you identify ways you can apply your unique blend of talent and passion to take meaningful climate action.
Find out more about the program's day-to-day here: What’s a Typical Week Like in Our Learning for Action Course?