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Right after graduation, Mary Boling (MBA’24) started an exciting role as an associate with the (CEBA). She works on the market insights team tracking clean energy deals—an entirely new direction from her previous career in education.

So, how did she make such a dramatic shift?

For Boling, it boiled down to self-awareness and seizing opportunities.

“No one is going to work harder for you to get a job than you,” she said. “You have to connect the dots.”

The value of an MBA

Boling had been teaching in Houston for three years as part of the Teach for America program when she and her husband moved to Colorado. She didn’t have a job lined up when they arrived, but through networking, she found roles in enrollment and student recruitment at Rocky Mountain Prep, a Denver-based charter school network.

After five more years in education, Boling felt ready to deepen her roots in Colorado. It also felt like the right time for a career change. She saw how colleagues had expanded their skills through advanced degrees.

“A master’s degree is one of many levers you can use to help shape your career,” she said. For her, pursuing an MBA helped craft a narrative around her career transition. It also created opportunities she knew would have been challenging to access or orchestrate without a program to offer resources.

But Boling didn’t go to grad school knowing she wanted to work in sustainability. She just knew she wanted to make an impact, and she believed she could do that outside of education. She approached the graduate school experience as an opportunity for self-exploration: What skills do I already have that are transferable? And where are my blind spots?

Then, she actively sought the answers.

“No one is going to work harder for you to get a job than you.”

Mary Boling (MBA’24)
 

The power of asking questions

She began to clarify her direction while attending conferences on combating climate change. She reflected on parallels she had noticed with how people advocate for educational equity, and it resonated with her background in teaching, advocacy and pushing forward efforts like DEI initiatives.

“The first thing that struck me was the clear action around procuring clean energy,” she said. That ultimately led Boling to pursue the Clean Energy MBA Pathway through the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at Leeds.

“CESR, in general, was a great resource,” Boling said, pointing to the Energy Finance Bootcamp and networking events as highlights. She was even honored by the center with an Impact Buff Award in 2024 for her contributions.

Being a networker

Boling’s work experience had already helped her flex her networking muscle, but she further developed it at Leeds, she said. She was intentional about tapping into every available resource: career guidance, internships, conferences, one-to-one conversations and classes, such as one that involved a semester of consulting work with , a Leeds alumni-founded company, where Boling made great contacts and better understood which skills she could transfer to the climate tech space.

“There’s only so much you can learn on the Internet about a company’s culture or what they’re looking for,” she said. Networking helped her discover job opportunities she might not have found otherwise. “You might know the shiny names of big companies, but through conversations, you find out about startups or smaller companies doing similar things.”

In fact, it was through a conversation that Boling discovered the Clean Energy Buyers Association. A contact pointed out that Boling’s education experience was well aligned with the organization’s mission to create awareness around clean energy. She began monitoring CEBA’s job board, and when the right opportunity came along, she already had a networking connection to help her resume stand out.

Leeds also equipped Boling with two components required for her job application: For a presentation sample, she waa able to use material from the International Duke University Energy in Emerging Markets Case Competition, for which her team pitched to Okra Solar, an Australian climate tech startup. For her writing sample, she submitted a final paper from her Socially Responsible Enterprise MBA class.

Being the solution

Sustainability is a field with immense potential for growth. Green job seekers are 29% more likely to get hired, according to .

“There’s a great deal of momentum [in sustainability], so that means there’s also a lot of competition,” Boling said. “You have to know what you’re going to provide. At the end of the day, they're paying you to help them push their work forward. Are you bringing in a network, or do you have experience solving similar problems?”

During her internship as a change manager at , Boling’s manager helped her connect with the company’s sustainability team, and while onsite for a project in Vermont, she connected with the sustainability lead. She also talked with a fellow ��������Ƶ MBA student who was working there as a sustainability intern. Through her work and those discussions, Boling got to see how change management plays a crucial role in launching sustainability initiatives. She could frame her skills as a competitive edge.

Being resilient

Like most job seekers, Boling faced some rejections and lack of responses along the way.  She learned not to take those as a sign of being incompetent or incapable, knowing they could be related to other circumstances, like an internal hire. Her friend gave her a great analogy: “A job search is like water finding cracks to flow through—you just need to keep moving.”

As Boling dives deeper into the clean energy industry, her practice in resilience will come in handy.

She was inspired by a recent webinar that discussed mental fatigue when confronting the daunting task of climate change. “One thing they brought up is that to see progress, you need to make sure you’re replenished,” she said.

“I think the questions I always have in the back of my head are, ‘Where can I be plugging in? Do I feel like what I've done has had an impact, whether it’s at a macro level, or even at a micro level?’” It helps to focus on small, incremental wins to stay positive, she emphasized. “You have to pay attention to what you can control.”