Hannah Morgan earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from a SUNY institution, followed up with a fellowship in the SUNY system administration offices and then launched her career with yet another SUNY institution.
For her, the system works. “The SUNY education system creates leaders, critical thinkers and hard workers,” Morgan said. “It offers diverse experiences that accelerate active learning.”
Morgan got her undergraduate degree in 2010 from ESF, where she studied environmental science with a concentration in renewable energy systems. She stayed on campus for a master’s in professional studies in environmental science with a focus on environmental systems and risk management and, at the same time, worked in the Office of Sustainability at Syracuse University. Then she spent six months as a fellow in the SUNY Office of Sustainability at the university system’s headquarters in Albany. Now, she is the sustainability coordinator at SUNY Oneonta.
In her four years with Oneonta, Morgan has helped establish a waste management program that saved the college at least $60,000 a year, worked with local county officials to launch a large-scale compost facility that will divert all food waste from campus, and initiated a facilities project to obtain rebates for energy improvements and reinvest those funds in new “green projects,” such as the installation of energy-conserving LED lights.
“This campus is incredible to work for,” she said. “It’s so supportive of sustainability.”
Hannah Morgan B.S. ’10, M.P.S. ’12 is the sustainability coordinator at SUNY Oneonta.
Her job involves contact with students, faculty and staff. In addition to waste management and food systems projects, her work touches on energy conservation and stormwater management projects.
“It’s fun because it’s energizing. Every day is different. The students are active at Oneonta, and they are already initiating new things before I get around to suggesting them. It’s fun being part of a change agent on campus,” she said.
Her work with Oneonta’s 6,100 students is rooted in her years at ESF.
She said ESF’s hands-on approach to education, along with her participation as president of the Green Campus Initiative, gave her the skills to engage Oneonta students and get them to participate in sustainability events on campus. Her pride in ESF is such that when Oneonta students talk to her about graduate school, she steers them toward her alma mater.
“I tell them ESF is No. 1 in the nation for environmental education,” she said.
Morgan is confident that students who are following in her academic footsteps will find employment in their field. “We’ll see a trend in these positions. They do save money. Employers are looking for ways to make their operations more efficient, and these are some of the people who can help achieve that.”
As an undergraduate, Morgan didn’t realize the extent to which the people she met in her classes and at campus events would resurface in her professional life.
“One of the benefits of attending ESF was that throughout all my years there, I was meeting people I ended up working with after college,” she said. “I meet people all over the place who I went to school with who are working now in granting agencies or county jobs or private businesses. I’m always running into Stumpies.”
