Green Options

Got a story, a camera, and some time over the holiday break? Get shooting — the National Geographic Preserve Our Planet College Film and PSA contest is underway. Contest winners can look forward to cash prizes, and screenings of their video the National Geographic Explorers gathering in June 2009.

This year’s theme, “Together We Can Make a Difference,” should get those wheels turning — with so many college organizations, and colleges and universities themselves, taking steps towards sustainability, there are many great stories that need to get told.

Official rules are available at the contest site.  The catch — the deadline for submissions is coming up pretty quickly: December 31 (sorry… just found out about this last week).

A Tufts senior e-mailed me the other day, attaching her resume and asking for career advice. While that play of events seems typical, her ambitions probably didn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold of most of her class peers. She wanted to run her own eco-retreat center one day, felt passion for the green movement and embraced her ecopreneurial passions.

In short, she blew away the goals and mindset I had back in my twenty-something days, when the only “green” in my world came out of an ATM machine. And frankly, as I’ve been off the mainstream career path for nearly two decades now, I don’t typically have seniors knocking on my e-mail door for advice. So I felt compelled to launch a dash of the unconventional her way — a dose of out-of-the-box career advice for someone heading down ecopreneurial career paths at a young age. Here’s what I sent to her:

The college years are an exciting transitional time for young people. Many are off on their own for the first time, and they’re faced with responsibility for their own actions and their own well-being. For some teens, college is the first time they experience autonomy, and the variety of choices they’re faced with can be overwhelming, and the pressure of making green choices might just be too much to handle. There

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