How Did You Get Your Start?

I've had a couple of pivots in my career.

I’m the first woman in my family to go to college so UVA was just eye-opening. I chose international relations because I was curious about how the world works and how cultures come together beyond Virginia and the U.S.

At the end of my four years, I talked to people I worked with in the admissions office about how I can get a job like theirs because I wasn’t ready to leave UVA. They said I could get a higher education administration master’s at the UVA School of Education and Human Development. So that was the first little chapter of my career.

Then I worked for colleges and universities like Georgetown as their Director of Law Alumni Affairs but I got an itch to see what was happening in the world outside of what I was doing.

So I went to a consulting firm and got exposed to other areas of consulting through my colleagues who were doing really cool things with big corporations. I said to my boss, I'd love to work on one of the corporate accounts and he gave me the Coca-Cola account, which at the time was a tiny little thing. But we grew it to be the firm's largest account.

Over the course of seven years as a consultant for Coca-Cola, we slowly but surely convinced them that they needed a sustainability strategy to deal with issues like packaging waste, labor concerns, and water stress. So I got recruited into Coke to help launch their first sustainability strategy.

I've spent 25 years working in corporate sustainability, helping big companies like Coca-Cola and Mars and a number of others put themselves on the map as companies that care about social and environmental issues.

And today, I thought I was going to retire but then realized about nine months into retirement that I wasn't really ready to be retired.

I got a connection into Darden through somebody that I worked with way back when at Coca-Cola, so now, I am helping Darden build relationships with companies for student career opportunities, for faculty research, and I'm always eager to help students and faculty dig into sustainability.