News

Cleary-Hammarstedt first learned about the Partnership on a campus tour she took as a newly admitted student, and by the end of her freshman year, she was sitting in on the official adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Cleary-Hammarstedt, an IDEAS major who studied environmental engineering and sustainable development, was involved in many areas on campus. Sheserved as a three year representative for NGO Tarumitra at the UN, and as a member of the Global Citizenship Program. Additionally, Cleary-Hammarstedt was an Iacocca intern in Moldova, a founding member of the Greening the UN Missions team, and studied abroad in Cambodia, Kenya, and Vietnam. 

She recognized the importance of branching out from typical engineering classes and extracurriculars. She credits the Global Studies classes she took and Global Citizenship program as a launchpoint outside of her immediate IDEAS program.

“With respect to the Partnership, it really just brought all those things together.”

In addition to her engineering degree, Cleary-Hammarstedt thinks it was the soft skills she learned through the Partnership that landed her a position as an environmental engineer at Parsons immediately following her graduation.

“It’s another really good reason to be part of the UN Partnership, because you're getting to exercise those social skills in a professional way,” said Cleary-Hammarstedt.

In particular, she notes that those in both the business and engineering schools could benefit from the communication and collaboration skills she developed during her time involved in the Partnership.

“That's just another element of getting involved, doing things that are maybe different from what you're studying in class. More importantly, for people who are going to end up making critical decisions, you need to be able to communicate with people about the solutions that you're coming up with.”

These soft skills Cleary-Hammarstedt honed during her time at the Partnership proved to be especially advantageous when Cleary-Hammarstedt applied for the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Program in in Coastal Hazards, Risks, Climate Change Impacts, and Adaptation (COASTHazar). The Erasmus Mundus Program, implemented in 2004 by the European Union, encourages students to pursue a global education by allowing them to get one or more masters degrees in two or more countries in the EU.

“If I had just been a traditional engineer, I would not have been as competitive for this master's program," she explained.

This highly competitive program was the perfect combination of her interests in coastal engineering and social justice.

Through this masters program, Cleary-Hammarstedt was able to pivot from studying  sustainability, like she did at Lehigh, to focusing her research on climate resilience and adaptation.

Noting the difference between the two, “One, it's about mitigating climate change, it's reducing our emissions, and it's really important. And then the other is recognizing that we are locked into an amount of emissions now, and we have to prepare, especially on the coast, for what those changes mean. It was eye opening for me.”

She was able to do so in three distinct locations throughout Europe during her two year stint on the continent. The coastal engineering program was based out of the Netherlands, followed by another in Spain, then a semester in Portugal, then back to Spain.

She traveled with the program's inaugural cohort of twenty students from eleven countries, ultimately completing her thesis at the IHCantabria research institute in Spain. The experience “was really cool because the class connected me with people from all over the world who are working on the same issues I care about," she said.

Now that she is recently finished with her masters, Cleary-Hammarstedt looks back fondly on the experiences at the Partnership that helped get her there.

“I feel like I'm really a testament to how much you can experience if you put yourself out there.”

And for current or potential Lehigh students interested in getting involved in the Partnership, Cleary-Hammarstedt advises a similar sentiment, “If you apply for these different types of programs that Lehigh has, it can really stand out, both on your resume. Hiring managers are going to be way more excited to talk to you about these global experiences that you had than your normal classes.” 

“The UN Partnership is a gateway to engage with so many incredible people! Don't hesitate! Take a leap and get involved,” she concluded.