{"id":3360,"date":"2015-08-25T11:36:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T15:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/?p=3360"},"modified":"2015-08-25T15:24:51","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T19:24:51","slug":"final-thoughts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/final-thoughts-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Final Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I finished my internship at the Rocky Mountain Institute and I\u2019m back in Durham for another year of school.\u00a0 I wanted to write one last post to sum up my thoughts from the summer.<\/p>\n

As I described in my first post, RMI is a place full of creatively-thinking, driven, and visionary people, and working with all of them this summer was inspiring.\u00a0 RMI is known as a leader in sustainable energy by many across the field, and being a part of that was fantastic.\u00a0 The work I did for the buildings team, writing case studies about outstanding deep retrofits, I know will be used to move more of the building industry forwards towards sustainable energy use.<\/p>\n

Despite this forward-thinking culture, though, my behavioral energy efficiency work was more difficult than expected.\u00a0 I realized this summer that the inertia towards behavior change exists universally, even in individuals who sincerely care about the cause that the behavior change would help.\u00a0 At the end of my internship, I wrote up my proposal for the behavioral energy efficiency program, including suggested strategies to incentivize plug load reductions and promote sustainable commuting, as well as best practices for hoteling.\u00a0 I achieved my end goal, but the path there wasn\u2019t as smooth as I\u2019d expected.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about this as I climbed my last mountain of the summer, the weekend after I finished my internship.\u00a0 With a group of five others, I embarked up Kelso Ridge on Torrey\u2019s Peak, a Class 3 scrambling route that required some technical climbing and most definitely the use of climbing helmets.\u00a0 The trek up this 14er didn\u2019t go as well as my last one; I was climbing on four hours of sleep and so wasn\u2019t feeling my best.\u00a0 Pictured below is the \u201cknife edge\u201d: the most difficult part of the route, where we had to cross an ten to fifteen foot edge of rock by scooting across it.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20150815_095354999\"<\/a>
The Knife Edge on Torrey’s Peak<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The climb did not go as pleasantly as planned, and neither did my behavioral energy efficiency work at RMI.\u00a0 What matters, though, is that in both cases I reached my goal.\u00a0 I can dream big and aim high in my career and personal life, and just need to be prepared that the way to those goals won\u2019t always be pretty, but if I\u2019m determined and thoughtful I can do what I want to do!<\/p>\n

Thanks for following my blog this summer.\u00a0 I hope you all learned a little bit about behavioral energy efficiency and enjoyed seeing the pictures of colorful Colorado!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I finished my internship at the Rocky Mountain Institute and I\u2019m back in Durham for another year of school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[211,72,43],"tags":[246,224,223,82],"coauthors":[228],"class_list":["post-3360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colorado-2015","category-internships","category-students","tag-behavior","tag-colorado","tag-energy-efficiency","tag-internship"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2reSA-Sc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3360"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3365,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions\/3365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3360"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/internshipblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}