Sustainability-Focused Summer Internships and Grants

Emma Monson (Class of 2023) first learned about TerraCycle when the company’s founder and CEO visited her first-year course Business and Society as a guest speaker. Emma is concentrating in Sustainable Business and Management with a minor in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “After that, I continued to be interested in TerraCycle,” she says. “When I happened to find an internship listing on their website, I knew I had to apply.” 

TerraCycle offers a range of recycling platforms to allow everyone to recycle practically everything. They partner with companies and brands who sponsor the recycling of their products after consumers use them. They are a great option for students looking for sustainability summer internships.  According to Emma, “I believe it is so important to consume and dispose of waste properly and in the best way for the environment. I have also always wanted to work for a social enterprise, a company that focuses on achieving their mission over profits.” Emma also wanted to gain experience in business operations. “TerraCycle is firstly guided by their mission in sustainability, but since they are a for-profit company I was also exposed to company operations to improve profits,” she says.

“Working toward a mission you believe in with others has great power and can make every day interesting and engaging.”

As part of TerraCycle’s development team, Emma helped secure partnerships with brands. She explains, “On a typical day, I would sit in on sales calls with potential partners. Participating in these sales calls was a great learning experience because even though TerraCycle is a mission-driven business, their potential clients usually aren’t. So it is important to make the financial case to them and show them how we would improve their profits. I also assisted in the development of a prospect pipeline by contact mining for brands that would make good partners in the future. I put together case studies on current recycling programs and helped create slide decks for sales meetings.” 

Emma credits NYU’s Office of Sustainability with contributing to her success in finding sustainability summer internships. “First, they offered funding so I was able to take an unpaid internship and advance my career and learning. They also offered great professional development sessions that allowed me to explore other areas in the sustainability sector. And being in a cohort with other students who received the Sustainability Internship Grant meant I was part of a community that I could lean on and learn from.”

Yagmur Gungor (Class of 2023), an Economics major minoring in Social Entrepreneurship, is interested in the intersection of design thinking and sustainability. She wants to help develop solutions for the planet’s needs through design. “I believe that a human-centered approach is critical for the linear economy’s transformation into a circular economy because sustainability is a collective issue,” she says. 

“I'm particularly interested in the intersection of design thinking and sustainability, where we can solve complex problems of the planet's need for sustainability through design and create impact.”