Senior Marketing and Communications Intern for the Loeb Center Ava Zielinski ’25 chats with Alumni-in-Residence guest Luke Lavin ’13 to discuss what drew him to becoming a senior research engineer in the Grid Planning and Analysis Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory , helpful advice he has received about grad school, and what students could do if they are unsure about what to do when they graduate.
The transcription below has been edited for clarity.
Ava:
I’m here with the great honor of sitting down with Luke Lavin, Class of 2013. And so, yeah, first to kick it off, something I like to do, I like to ask everybody is to give us your elevator pitch. You know, you walk into an elevator with some really cool, famous person that you might worship to some sort of degree. And they’re like, ‘Hey, what do you do?’ What would you say to them?
Luke:
Great. So first of all, thanks to Amherst and thanks to Ava for inviting me to do this. And hopefully this is helpful to someone in the future, including whoever I’m about to elevator pitch.
So my elevator pitch to folks would be that the electric grid is sort of one of the coolest machines that humans have ever invented. It’s the backbone of how we run our modern society. And right now it’s changing. And what I do at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a big part of ensuring that that change allows us to build not only a more sustainable future, but one where the grid is bigger, reliable and affordable.
And the way that we’re going to do that is by focusing on new technologies or growing technologies like wind energy, like solar energy, like batteries that we’re doing research on right now at the lab. How can we use more of those in the future to support the outcomes that this country wants to see, like building electric vehicles and data centers and other economic opportunities to bring the benefits of electricity to everyone?
And yeah, that’s what we’re doing.
Ava:
Wow. That is very incredible. And that is also very hard to comprehend too from most people’s standpoints, so that’s really wonderful.
And well, my question for you then going from there, because that is a very specific sort of field that you were studying and executing your work in.
What made you decide to come to Amherst then? This cute little liberal arts college in the middle of Massachusetts. Where does that fit in for you?
Luke:
So that’s a good question. You know, when I was in high school, I really didn’t know exactly what I was interested in. And so I applied to liberal arts colleges sort of because of that, that I had interests in science and in math and in social science and I liked reading. And Amherst seemed like a really great place to explore those interests. And I think that was the right intuition.
So I ended up being, I guess, a physics/anthropology double major, which I feel like is a very Amherst type of outcome. And I feel like the real blessing and opportunity of being here was your professors, your fellow students really care.
They ask great questions just because they want to know things and because they want to understand how the world works from a variety of perspectives. And that was the experience that I had here. And I hope that’s the experience that other folks have.
Ava:
Yeah, I mean, as someone who’s graduating this year, also, similarly, I wanted to come to a liberal arts college because I had no idea what I wanted to study.
I was like, Wait, what do you mean you’re going to put yourself on a track for the rest of your life deciding at age 18. Like what you want to do? I don’t even know what I want to eat for breakfast tomorrow.
That’s the last thing I want to think about. So coming here was really nice that you got to explore it. And the open curriculum is such a godsend and I always forget that other schools don’t have that.
So I’m talking to my brother, who’s a first-year, he just started college and he’s like, Yeah, I have all of these requirements to do it. And I was like, Sucks for you.
Yeah, I never had to do that, which is totally fine. But yeah, the Amherst double-major is a little bit of an enigma. Where it really has these really interesting, very specific, very them combinations of what they’re studying. And they’re things that they’re so passionate about because you’re allowed to study all those things at once and you can’t really find that anywhere else.
So it’s very cool that that’s, you know, it’s always been around, it’s continuously evolving and I’m excited to see what students come up with in the future too.
But yeah, so like going off of that too, physics and anthropology, what inspired your decision to pursue a career in engineering and were there any pivotal moments specifically here at Amherst that were deciders that helped you envision what your future could look like?
Luke:
Great. So also a good question. And, you know, these narratives always make more sense in hindsight than they probably made at the time. But, you know, well, we’ll try it anyway.
So I think the honest answer is that I didn’t know that I wanted to have a career in engineering when I was an undergrad. That sort of evolved afterward. However, when I was a junior, I had the opportunity to take a small seminar course, I believe it’s called Inquiries into the Catastrophic. And I want to say Chris Dole taught it.
We read wildly about different types of disasters and sort of how they had affected people and things like, you know, earthquakes in Turkey and more to the point, nuclear accidents of various kinds. And it was through reading about that and talking with folks that I was like, oh, there actually is an overlap between social science and more sort of physics or traditional science interests and that and energy and things related to energy said at the center about things like nuclear power.
So then I ended up doing my senior thesis on that and what I saw through doing my senior thesis about a closed nuclear reactor up in Vermont that was operating back when I was a student, was that the main driving force behind why would you keep this reactor
open or closed mostly had to do with how cheap is electricity in the New England area, which was being driven at that time by low natural gas prices.
And so what I drew from that was, oh, what really matters for the future of energy and electricity in this country is, you know, how do we pay people? How does that affect what we’re going to decide to build? And the people who really understand that are the engineers and economists and policy folks in that space. And that’s how I got then linked up with those folks, like sent emails to Amherst alums and emails to other people. They were kind enough to take opportunities and time on me and my career kind of developed from there.
So maybe the moral of that is to send folks questions if you have interests and you don’t really know where it’s going to lead.
Ava:
Yeah, we’re going to do a brief pause here. Everybody PSA, it’s not bad to ask people questions. It’s not bad to put yourself out there. And it’s not bad to go through the alumni directory and talk to Amherst alums.
Another thing, too, is that it’s been really interesting, especially over the past few years, having done internships and things like that, and running into other Amherst alums in different spaces. And the second you meet somebody, I even think I met somebody in a pharmacy once before I even started here.
He saw I was wearing an Amherst sweatshirt. So he’s like, Oh my gosh, you go to Amherst? I went to Amherst. What are you studying?
You never know when you’re going to find somebody. But the amount of joy and excitement
that another Amherst alum embraces when meeting somebody who understands the sort of experience that you’ve had is unparalleled.
So the same sort of thing is like guys, people will give you career advice. They will take a chance on you because they know that you are smart and you work hard and you understand what it’s like to have gone here.
Luke:
So I completely agree with this and I genuinely think it applies even just beyond Amherst alums. Maybe this is a little like, how do you want to put this? I’m not sure how widely my personal experience applies. However, if you show genuine interest in what people have spent their life doing, they probably will take time to talk to you, because that’s the whole point of why they spent their life doing it. It’s because they were really interested in it and want to talk to people about it.
Ava:
That is fantastic advice. So thank you for that. Thank you for elaborating on that. Kind of going off of that too, after networking with people, understanding this space that you wanted to enter into potentially post-grad.
Can you give us sort of a snapshot of what your career journey has looked like until now?
Luke:
So hopefully there aren’t too many stages of this. But when I first graduated, I worked for a couple of small think tanks doing environmental and energy policy-related issues.
I then sort of thought that I was going to go to grad school because as the low man on the totem pole at a think tank, you’re mostly forwarding other people’s ideas, not your own. And I was like, Oh no, I want to think again and go to grad school.
But then I also got an opportunity to work at an electricity consultancy in San Francisco. And so I went out to the Bay Area for a few years and did that, and then I decided that I wanted to go back to grad school because I sort of saw that even in the consulting world, the people who were doing the real cool work, the model development, the ideation, not just the spreadsheet stuff were people who had gone to grad school who understood how electricity worked and how to do fancy math optimization problems.
And so I ended up then going and doing that as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon in the Engineering and Public Policy Department. So that’s, I guess, how I kind of got into engineering, if you will, although it is a bit of an interdisciplinary program.
And then after that, honestly, the folks who I met when I was a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, the ones who I respected the most and liked working with the most, they ended up working at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
And so I reached out to them when I was finishing up my degree and they were kind enough to take a chance on me. And that’s where I’ve been since then.
Ava:
Wow, that’s wonderful. That is really cool. Going into grad school a little bit, something I’m interested to hear about is that decision to delay grad school for a little while and things like that.
What do you wish that you knew about beforehand before you made that decision to go to grad school to begin with, what that process was like? What was the learning that you were going to go through like?
Luke:
Yep. So those are all really good questions. And this will definitely vary by the person and the type of grad school, I think that I’ll do sort of hopefully two quick things here.
The advice that I got when I was an undergrad that in my view was correct.
So hopefully she remembers this. But I got this from Nusrat Chowdhury, who was my senior thesis advisor when I believe she was a first-year professor back then. So the advice that I got from her that I would pass on to people is that grad school is something that you should do, especially a Ph.D. is something that you should do sort of because you can’t imagine doing anything else, which is to say if at the end of the years that you spent and it will be years doing a Ph.D., you still ended up at the same type of job or type of work that you had before you did the Ph.D., you would still feel like that time was worthwhile because you were so interested in spending your time that way.
So I think just something to think about before you commit, you know, years of your life doing a Ph.D. With that said, there’s sort of the second part of your question.
Let me make sure I get it right. Can you restate it one more time?
Ava:
Essentially, what do you wish you had known about the sort of learning that you would be going through and the growth that you would be going through during that Ph.D. process?
Luke:
So the other thing that I think I want to say here that makes sense is if I had gone straight, so you all may be smarter and more brilliant than me and have all your own ideas. But if I had gone straight into graduate school after being an undergrad, I don’t think I would have had the ability to work on a topic that was both important and my own idea.
I think that spending some time working with people and seeing what people outside of the academic firmament value in academic research helps you come up with your own topics. And I think that when I was in graduate school, I worked with a pretty, at least within the school that I was in, a pretty senior and eminent professor, and he was great and he had time for me.
But really what he had time for was helping my ideas be successful. I don’t think it would have worked very well if I had just been like, What’s your idea? Let me do exactly that. It was more like, Oh, Luke is great. Let’s put him in touch with my friend so-and-so. Let’s put him in touch with this really well-known professor so he can ask his questions.
And I think that working for a few years helped me be in that position when I was in grad school, and that would’ve been harder for me if I had gone straight to grad school.
Ava:
But that’s great advice. Thank you for that. So after grad school, you went into working at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory where you currently work.
Can you tell us a little bit about the position that you have now, what your day-to-day might look like, what sort of the big picture goal that you have in mind is?
Luke:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. The big picture is always hard.It’s like the big picture goal is to hopefully do interesting research and work with great people.
But you know, you know, that said, so the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is one of I think it’s 17 or something like that Department of Energy labs so that’s sort of who mostly funds our research and work. It ranges a bit from more basic science to engineering things like, you know, testing new types of solar cells, testing new types of wind turbines.
And then to what I do, which is more focused on how can we model a future electric grid that uses very different generation and storage technologies than the one that we observe today and still make sure that it is reliable, that it’s affordable, even though we all know that the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, batteries can run out of charge and you have to kind of plan around that.
So what I then do on a day-to-day basis is we do a fair amount of I would say in some ways software development. We sort of release open access code and tools that help people model the electric grid. And so because we’re funded by the federal government, that stuff tends to become public.
We do a fair amount of work on developing data sets that inform decision making. Where is it windy in the United States versus not? Where is it sunny? Where is there good geothermal resource? That type of stuff we tend to do.
And then the other big way that I spend my time is we propose work, we write papers and then to do really great work, you do also end up having to manage teams of folks. So I spend a fair amount of my time in meetings trying to work with people who are frankly better than me at stuff like write better code, write better papers and see if I can get them on my team so that we can do the best possible work.
Ava:
Wow. So you do a lot of stuff. That is awesome. It’s the liberal arts of jobs right there. You have a lot of different variety, which is pretty cool.
Luke:
Yeah, I like my job so I do recommend it.
Ava:
That is fantastic. So yeah, thank you for that snapshot. I know we’re getting a little bit short on time, so I just want to ask you one more question, which is what advice would you give to an Amherst student who might be interested in engineering or going into funded research or to an Amherst student who might be experiencing a little bit of difficulty in picturing what their next step might be after college?
Luke:
Great. So I don’t think that this is easy. So like, I don’t–How do I want to put this?
I had a lot of challenges and missteps after I graduated where I thought I wanted to be more in the policy space, and then I thought consulting would be great. And then I was in grad school and like, it wasn’t always obvious at the time what the next step was.
But two things that I’ll say that I think helped it mostly work out, which is like, you know, it’s subjective what works and what doesn’t. But that said, I think it’s really helpful to go into a field where there is at least a projection of it growing and changing. It tends to give you more opportunities earlier.
So I think I was very fortunate to enter the energy electricity space at a time where the grid was changing to integrate more wind technologies, solar technologies, the kind of things that we work on, because that change means not only does the field grow and change, but it also tends to give you more opportunities and more varied opportunities at earlier stages in your career because people are looking for smart, motivated young people to help them pivot into a new area.
You know, maybe traditionally they worked on, you know, coal-related technologies and it’s like, oh, well, there’s not as much growth in that space. So we’re switching over to these renewable technologies. Oh, like Luke is a smart young person who we can hire to help us work on that, right? So opportunity kind of comes out of that. And I think it’s worth at least considering or thinking about.
And then, you know, beyond that, my generic advice would be work on things that you’re interested in and excited about. In some ways, four years of college is a very short time compared to a full career where you tend to focus on one thing for years and sometimes even decades at a time, and maintaining that level of motivation over that duration of time.
It was hard or it’s been hard, I should say. For me, I expect it to continue to be hard in the future, but it really helps to be somewhere that you feel like you’re working with great people on things that you care about. So, you know, just think about that.
Ava:
Yeah, that’s huge. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for this interview. There’s been so much knowledge that has been passed, so thank you for that.
