Four years of collaborative research and a lot of hard work are paying dividends for Wes Hanson ’16.
Wes is an agricultural economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Energy and Environmental Policy. The position is part of a Presidential Management Fellowship, the federal government’s flagship leadership development program. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Maryland, and was one of 6,040 applicants for the competitive fellowship program. Seven percent were chosen.
Both Wes and wife Leigh Ann ’16, a social work associate with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, are U.S. Air Force veterans, and paid for their educations through the Yellow Ribbon Program — a program offered by Linfield that pays tuition expenses not covered by the GI Bill.
At Linfield, Leigh Ann studied psychology, which she says was a natural fit for her after serving as a mental health technician for six years in the U.S. Air Force. Wes, an environmental studies major, conducted collaborative research with Professor Nancy Broshot for four years and says the hands-on experience was crucial to his success.
“Many, if not most, of my grad school classmates didn’t have as deep an understanding of the underlying science behind the environmental problems we were studying,” says Wes. “The environmental studies program at Linfield was pivotal to my understanding of those complicated concepts and their implications for developing robust, ambitious environmental policies.”
– Laura Davis
