Three years after launching her professional career in the waste and resource recovery sector, Penn undergraduate Erica Higa (BSE ’18, MES ’25) was ready to return to her alma mater to advance her education. She was working at Recology, a West Coast-based resource recovery company. “They specialize in waste collection, and have lots of composting, recycling, and transfer station facilities,” Erica explains. She worked in operations before moving to corporate sustainability. “I absolutely loved the work that I was doing and all I was learning about—from both the waste world and from the corporate sustainability world—and wanted to dive deeper into that area of expertise,” she says, “so I applied to Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies program.”
Previously, as a mechanical engineering undergrad at Penn, Erica nurtured her passion for the environment by leaning into her energy and sustainability minor, which introduced her to the vast environmental resources across campus, like the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. She took advantage of Penn’s service learning opportunities, participating in a course trip to Rwanda that helped deepen her appreciation for the practical impacts of renewable energy and the value that sustainability efforts bring to communities. And after graduating, Erica’s Penn service experiences and connections brought her to rural Ghana for a year where she worked on development projects with the nonprofit Cocoa360.
While she considered other graduate school paths, including nonprofit leadership, international development, and business administration, her undergrad experience and knowledge of Penn’s environmental focus helped clarify her decision. At Penn, Erica knew she would find rich, interdisciplinary opportunities, environmental expertise, and a commitment to student success. “Landing with MES was perfect,” she says.
In fall 2022, Erica left her West Coast home for the second time to study at Penn. For the next three years, she continued to work remotely at her waste management company, focused on resource recovery and sustainability, while completing her master’s degree part time.
"It’s amazing how many people in this country and all over the world are driving policy making—and they learned those foundations at this program."
For her MES, Erica chose the Environmental Sustainability concentration, building an interdisciplinary curriculum that would advance her knowledge base in the overlapping areas of corporate sustainability and resource management.
The course Leading Change for Sustainability with Kim Quick offered an optimistic perspective and practical strategies for implementing environmentally-focused change in the corporate world. “That class drove me towards understanding how businesses work, how people work, how organizations work and how to be able to embed those kinds of principles from the MES program into the organizations that I join in the future,” Erica shares. The class inspired some of her next course choices, including a Wharton negotiations course and Organizational Behavior and Decision Sciences program course, both taught by Nazli Bhatia, an instructor who left a deep impression with Erica. “She has such a clear understanding from research-based evidence of people and organizational behaviors, and being able to understand that so I can start to embed sustainability practices is really important to me,” she says.
Much like her undergraduate experience at Penn, Erica also looked for courses with international travel opportunities, taking a special MES program course on water resources that included a one-week trip to the 2024 World Water Forum in Bali.
Throughout her MES, she found that her courses offered the chance to apply classroom lessons to real-world challenges in her career, and vice versa. In The Principles of Mapping for Environmental Justice, for example, Erica developed her final project around Recology’s zero emissions fleet vehicle strategy, and was able to make the case to her team to look at how to prioritize where to implement the fleet first. “Being able to deploy those zero emission vehicles in a community that's already burdened by other environmental justice concerns is one way that a company can kind of do their part to reduce those burdens,” she says.
Her culminating capstone project addressed scope 3 emissions reporting in the waste industry. She was able to share her findings with her employer as well as present the research at the Global Waste Management Symposium this past winter.
Shortly after graduating in May 2025, Erica started a new job as a project engineer with Waga Energy, a company that recovers landfill biogas, upgrading it into renewable natural gas. “The flexibility of the MES program really allowed me to explore a lot of different avenues in terms of the science side of environmental studies, but also the business side of incorporating environmentalism into the corporate world,” she shares.
Recently, Erica spoke at an alumni panel about the real change happening in policy and corporate sustainability during the MES 30th anniversary celebration. “It’s amazing how many people in this country and all over the world are driving policy making—and they learned those foundations at this program,” she says.
Along with her optimism, Erica cautions that environmental work can feel incremental and gradual—and that’s okay. “There's a lot of work that needs to be done in the waste world and other industries, and I think a lot of times, in the environmental world, we want to challenge the system so much,” she says. “But progress is progress, and we don't need to be striving for perfection every day. That can be very bad for ourselves, for our mental health, for our relationships even.” She credits her MES experience for helping her understand how to work within existing systems and stay balanced while moving the needle on environmental goals. “Striving for progress is key. And I think that’s what I’m trying to do in the waste and biogas industry.”
