Chloe is an HBA 2023 candidate with an interest in finance, sustainable development, and impact investing. She grew up in Toronto, spending her summers camping across Eastern Canada, and has completed a month-long canoe trip from Labrador City to the Gulf of the St Lawrence River. She will be working in investment banking this coming summer, and hopes to pursue a career in sustainable finance, helping sustainability-driven companies succeed and thrive as they solve globally pressing issues.

What is your personal definition of sustainability?

Growing up, I spent my summers completing 12-to 28-day long canoe trips throughout Eastern Canada. From this, the value that was distilled in us by our leaders was simple yet fundamental: to leave every place better off than how you found it. Today, we are desensitized to so much of the damage we do to the things around us, making this value even more critical than it was when I was growing up. Sustainability, to me, is switching this desensitization to awareness, and purposefully leaving places better off than they have been previously.

What role do you see sustainability playing in your professional career?

I used to view my passion for the outdoors and sustainability as definitively separate from my professional interests and career choices. Over the past year, I’ve come to realize that as sustainability reaches the forefront of the business sector globally, as sustainability issues become unignorable, every field will have a sustainability component, providing opportunity to combine these two sides of myself. In my chosen sector of financial services, global leaders in investing have launched impact, sustainability, and environmental investing teams, focused on supporting companies that are solving global sustainability issues that will be critical to humanity’s success going forward. I hope to ultimately move into an impact investing role, in which I will be able to help companies focused on the right things, and innovating in crucial sectors to succeed. I believe this type of role will provide a unique opportunity to apply my core values surrounding sustainability to my academic and professional interest in evaluating businesses.

What sustainability projects have you been engaged in?

In my time as a summer camp counsellor and outdoor education leader, I was driven by passion for the outdoors and environment. As a camp that owed so much to the nature around us, many actions we took were focused on preservation and education surrounding the environment. However, there were still areas that I felt we lacked respect and had a responsibility to both educate young campers engaging with the outdoors often for the first time, and reduce our impact. From this, I decided to begin a Food Waste Challenge, rewarding sections with the least food waste, ultimately resulting in roughly one milk crate worth of food waste per meal, compared to 2-3 garbage bins previously. I further discussed other initiatives to implement in future years with our director team including MeatlessMondays, and replacing plastic packaged snacks. On campus, as the Vice President of Women in WIC(Western Investment Club),I have focused on tackling social issues surrounding diversity in a traditionally homogenous industry. Through implementing diversity-centric initiatives, we have reached ~100 females with a potential interest in finance, and paired50 first-and second-year students with female members both on campus and in the industry.