Today, I imagine myself as a Senior Asset Manager at Cypress Creek Renewables. The

job is a challenging opportunity. It involves handling the logistics to sustain a financial portfolio of massive, installed and operating solar panel systems across the country. The portfolio includes a collection of sites each with a budget of monthly expenses that take into account allocating funds to all levels of investors required to sustain it. The company refers to the portfolio as a waterfall. The name is derived from the process of collaborating with departments across the company to make optimal financial decisions that result in the maximum amount of funds remaining for my company to put more renewable energy into the ground. I want the job because I am amazed humans can harness energy from the sun by converting it into usable electricity in a cost-effective manner and aim to apply my skillset to tasks with the ultimate purpose of efficiently reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I should be promoted into the position because my experience getting the graduate degree prepared me with the skillset required to excel in it. At the beginning of the graduate program, as I mentioned in Reflection 1, “I hoped to gain a comprehensive understanding of the factors at play in global climate change so that I could launch myself into a position that took strides to sustain the earth” (Friedman 2022a). Further, as I mentioned in Reflection 2, my accomplishment in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the factors at play in global climate change through the graduate degree was useful in terms of informing my ultimate decision to return to work in the renewable energy industry (Friedman 2022b). However, it was not until the capstone that I was held accountable for embarking on the journey of reflection to clarify my purpose and refine my attributes that empowered me to recently become a part of the Cypress Creek Renewables team as its Asset Management Analyst.

I noticed that getting the master’s degree, in the eyes of others, enhanced my ethical appeal in a way that is not necessarily based upon the content I learned about climate change. Rather, I set myself apart from other candidates in the industry because of my past professional experience as well as my attributes that I developed over the course of completing the program. My prior job as a residential solar project manager provided me with enough experience to get my foot in the door at the company and place me in my current position. Additionally, a crucial aspect of the degree is its representation of my attributes: passion, diligence, tenacity, and trust in the process. Specifically, the capstone supported me in refining the attributes that I will need to be promoted into the job I want in the future at Cypress Creek Renewables. Specifically, it trained me to trust in the process. One of my discussion comments in the final week of the quarter emphasized the assignments that were due along the way were so useful in supporting my participation in a thorough writing process. I proceeded to value the importance of remembering that I have the power to create a a process to achieve any goal. Further, I highlighted that doing so and trusting the process will help me to have resilience during the difficult parts of the process and, in turn, achieve the desired result. I concluded in stating that, therefore, it is smart to honor the law that executing a process yields excellent results.

Completing the capstone within the graduate degree showed me I am capable of staying in a professional pursuit that presents road bumps along the way and can achieve anything by trusting the process. Before the capstone, I had never stayed in a post-undergraduate professional endeavor for more than a year because I left as soon as major challenges were presented to me. I figured they were too intense to navigate. A perfect time to quit the capstone process would have been when I received a failing grade on my rough draft. However, instead I trusted the process and remembered that, as part of it, I learned that revision is the difficult, magical process of restructuring the argument to honor its purpose. As I mentioned in Reflection 2, “while working on my capstone report, I have noticed my high level of organization helps me do well in detail- oriented, difficult endeavors that I may have never done before” (Friedman 2022b). I can rely on enhancing my organizing when the going gets tough at Cypress Creek Renewables in order to have resilience and attain my goal of being promoted. Also, the communication skills that I learned, specifically in the capstone, are transferrable to my pursuit of attaining the job I want. The capstone specifically supported me in understanding how to align my purpose with how I communicate. As I mentioned in Reflection 2, “after learning about how awareness of language choices constitutes building arguments, I can leverage rhetoric strategies” (Friedman 2022b). I see myself applying my new skills to communicating with Cypress Creek Renewables team members as well as external investors to excel and be promoted. Now that I have reached the end of this experience, I feel so capable in seeing challenges as opportunities for the remainder of my career. Although I have never been required to do the amount of reflection required by this course, I am glad I did. The self-knowledge is going to support me in achieving career advancements going forward.

References

Friedman, Mary. 2022a. “Reflection 1”. University of Denver.

Friedman, Mary. 2002b. “Reflection 2”. University of Denver.