Katherine McCusker turned her passion for green building into a career after she pursued our Professional Master’s program in Building Systems. Katherine works now for Integrated Eco Strategy in North Adams, MA. We recently checked in with her and she provided this advice for other students:

“As a BCT grad student at UMass, I worked in the Facilities Department as Green Building Intern. I got to see how campus staff were planning for and implementing green building principles on campus. My thesis work looked at how buildings on campus compared, from an energy consumption perspective — benchmarking the EUIs.

I now work for a firm in North Adams called Integrated Eco Strategy. We are green building consultants who have found a niche in the world of Living Building Challenge (LBC) projects, specifically helping project teams with the Materials Petal of the program. We’ve worked on a few local LBC projects: the Kern Center at Hampshire College, the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst and The Class of ’66 Center for the Environment at Willams College. After our first project we realized we needed something better than an Excel spreadsheet to manage our work, so we developed software called Red2Green. This software provides a product library, a method to research building materials for LBC compliance, and a management tool to documentation the work from conceptual design through project audit. We launched the software a few months ago and I’m developing trainings on the software right now.

I was able to make a career shift from museum exhibition design into the world of green building because of the BCT program. Thank you BCT!”

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Are you also a BCT/BMATWT alumnus?

We would like to feature you here, too. Send an email with a photo and some lines about yourself to the program director.