Sustainability for Our Present and Future with Mentor Paulina Terrazas
Paulina Terrazas, a junior at Panamerican University in Mexico City, Mexico, has always enjoyed learning “a lot about things that make me understand the world better.” She has a boundless enthusiasm to improve her world, bouncing between and connecting subjects of interest: “anything that can lead me through any curious, new thing that I learned, I'll repeat it for like three weeks until I feel like it's enough and then move onto the next thing. And that's a little about what I do with sustainability.”
Paulina has been developing a weekly video blog introducing topics of interest surrounding sustainability to her audience of followers, and accessibility is key to her format. She shares tips “that you could either apply to your everyday life to like, be more eco‑friendly or, or just information for you to share with other people. That's very important for us to all have the most information available to understand what's going on right now.”
In doing so, Paulina empowers her audience to take matters into their own hands, and tackle what can feel like a looming or insurmountable issue, saying “sustainability has this aura around it, that it's so a problem of the future and we should do this for the next generation. And it actually isn't, that's something that was a concept born many, many years ago. And we're now living in that future. So it's something that we should address now.”
Paulina is expertly equipped to share a sustainability toolkit with others, having done the research herself. She started with incorporating everyday consumption tips into her lifestyle regarding water and energy to be more eco-friendly, and then moved to in-depth readings on the circular economy and upcycling. As an Innovation Design and Engineering major, Paulina is thinking even bigger, saying such efforts can “be upscaled to the government or industries and how everyone can take part in that design thinking process and ideology. Everything can be re-looped into the cycle of life and objects and everything around us.”
She is now aspiring to “turn the engineering and design industries around,” to flip industry models towards “a better future and present.” Paulina works with Curious Cardinals students to educate them on sustainability, and link their own interests in this large topic, creating blogs, projects, and resources that make an impact.
Want to work with Paulina or other mentors on Sustainability and becoming a climate activist this summer? Sign up here.
