James Fahmy, Class of 2024: Sustainability, Business, & Marketing

In summer 2022, I interned as a carbon market analyst for Allied Offsets. This data-technology startup, based in London, thrives to bring price transparency to an opaque market as the world’s first aggregated data source for carbon offsetting. Their interactive platform allows clients to analyze data that provides a wide range of benefits: to help find the entities selling carbon offsets from projects, to understand indicative prices of credits broken down by volume and vintage, and to identify the potential pipeline of future projects. As an analyst, I performed market research, wrote detailed reports, and presented my findings to the leadership team. My aim was to help ensure that potential buyers could invest in projects that would allow developing countries to benefit from international responses to climate change.

My passion for sustainability drove me to pursue this internship. Working for a company with wide-reaching yet firm intentions allowed me to understand the importance of their goals to businesses of every kind. Due to the growing impetus being placed on companies becoming carbon neutral by 2050, as well as the looming prospect of net zero emissions in litigation, every organization is beginning to think about their carbon footprint. I hope that my exposure to the growing carbon market will allow me to educate my friends, peers, and colleagues about some of the key environmental issues that we face today and push me to drive my future communities towards a more sustainable future.

My experiences in the English department and the skills I have developed thus far prepared me well for my internship. The biggest skills that I took away from classes were the abilities to find and extract information from different contexts and to use that information to craft a detailed argument with a clear, overall goal. The wide variety of sectors that I was researching reminded me of the sheer breadth of time periods I see throughout my studies in English. My background in literary studies helped me understand that, whilst different contexts can produce different kinds of meaning, they can still be organized under a clear objective or thesis.

My written and oral communication skills, which I formed in the English department, continued to improve throughout my summer internship. A key role of mine was to analyze qualitative data before outlining it in reports and presentations. A takeaway from this work—which I would not have been able to learn through coursework alone—was that the information we convey to others can create material change. Creating a lasting impression can inspire people to expand their knowledge and thrive, as I saw when one of my reports convinced a client to invest and improve the quality of life in a developing country, whilst helping compensate for their carbon emissions. Our modes of communication can have a greater impact on more than just the individual level, causing changes that will keep inspiring me as I continue to develop.