How MBA/MCS students are merging business and climate

UC Berkeley Haas and the Rausser College of Natural Resources teamed up in fall 2024 to launch a concurrent degree program. The first 10 MBA/MCS students graduated from the program this past May. Read on for more about the unique student experience.

Combining real-world knowledge and theory

Emily Kargl, MBA/MCS 27, was playing the long game with her career when she decided to apply to the concurrent degree program in business and climate solutions at UC Berkeley Haas.

Before beginning the program, Kargl was a strategy consultant at Deloitte. During her four years there, she worked on sustainability projects for tech clients—and wanted to deepen her expertise in areas like ESG investing and supply chain sustainability. That led her to the combined business and climate solutions program with the Rausser College of Natural Resources.

Now finished with her first year, Kargl is digging into both disciplines—and racking up real-world experience, with summer internships at the Berkeley Endowment Management Company as an ESG investment intern and at Cisco as a supply chain sustainability intern.

MBA/MCS students largely take core business classes with the option to take climate solutions electives during their first year at Haas. One of Kargl’s favorites was Responsible Supply Chains and Operations in Action, co-taught by Assistant Professor Sytske Wijnsma, a supply chain expert, and Amy Chan, Haas’ former chief sustainability officer who spent over a decade leading supply chain sustainability initiatives at Apple. The class paired first- and second-year students together.

“That was a really fun class because it paired real-world knowledge with theory, and they brought in great speakers from the Bay Area who work in sustainable supply chains,” said Kargl, who is a member of both the student-run MBA Association as VP of Clubs, and VP of Allyship for the Asian Business Club. 

Engaging in thought-provoking conversations with classmates, learning new leadership skills, and exploring ethics in business were all important parts of her first year. “It’s been nice to come back to school in a dual-degree program and open my eyes a bit more,” she said. “I’m realizing it’s never too late to pivot.”

In the fall, Kargl will start thinking about the required second-year capstone project, which gives MBA/MCS students the opportunity to partner with organizations across business, government, and the nonprofit sector. She is exploring multiple areas for the capstone, including wildfire management, energy storage systems, biodiversity, and agriculture.

Working with a ‘dream client’ on carbon renewal

Varun Rajaram, MBA/MCS 26, spent his spring semester working with a dream client, a nonprofit that supports nature-based carbon removal projects. 

Alongside two students in the Rausser Master of Climate Solutions program, Rajaram worked to assess several projects planned by the Symbiosis Coalition, which works on nature-based climate solutions funded through a coalition of tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce. 

“It felt like an opportunity to have a real impact,” Rajaram said. 

Before graduate school, Rajaram worked at McKinsey as a software engineer on the climate analytics team, where he helped clients understand their exposure to flooding, extreme heat, and wildfires. In time, he developed a special interest in business strategy, which drew him to apply to the MBA program. 

“The main drive to come to business school was a desire to have a better understanding of how to make decisions given the data-driven realities of climate change’s impact,” he said. “I wanted to have an impact outside of the engineering realm, which is why the business and technical combination of the MBA/MCS program appealed to me.”

Among his Haas classes, he said the Energy and Environmental Markets course taught by Professor Lucas Davis was a favorite. The class focuses on electricity markets and how power is bought and sold. Rajaram also worked as a graduate teaching assistant for Lecturer Andrew Isaacs’ Climate Change and Business Strategy class and was involved in the multidisciplinary Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC). 

Participation in BERC as well as attending mixers during Climate Week in San Francisco helped Rajaram land internships at two climate-focused startups. “Going to events consistently yields real results,” he said. “You start to develop relationships with people over time, and eventually people associate you as someone who is passionate about and knows something about a particular subject area. You make real connections that lead to great job opportunities.”

In summer 2025, he worked for Brightband, a company developing a more accurate and personalized weather forecasting tool to help people adapt to increasingly extreme weather. This summer, he’s working for Absolute Climate, a tech company providing quality assurance in the carbon removal industry.

Rajaram said the biggest benefits of the dual program are the diversity of voices and industries represented in MCS paired with the deep business skills he’s learning at Haas. 
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An investment banker’s path to climate finance

After several years of working in an investment bank in Hong Kong, Sandy Sun, MBA/MCS 27, was ready for a change.

In her personal life, she had already made a shift to more sustainable habits like shopping at grocery stores that used less packaging and bringing her own containers to fill with takeout food. She also stopped buying new clothes and instead shopped secondhand. 

“When I reflected on my lifestyle and the things I was willing to put effort into after such long working hours, I realized I spent so much of my time trying to avoid waste and making sure my individual decisions were good for the earth,” said Sun, who grew up in Taiwan.

That reflection contributed to Sun’s decision to apply to the MBA/MCS program. 

After graduation, she plans to pursue a career in climate-related financial investment. She has interned with Circulate Capital, an emerging markets investment manager focused on building circular supply chains, and she is spending her summer interning with Generate Capital, a North American energy platform in San Francisco.

Though she hasn’t taken any classes from the MCS program yet, Sun did join the Haas Climate Solutions Fund, co-led by industry veterans Todd Evans and Matt Price, both MBA 07, where students invest in real-world deals to learn how to structure financing for climate solutions. Next year, she will be the teaching assistant for the class.

Sun also took part in two case competitions last year working with other business and climate solutions students. In the Rice Business Energy Case Competition, her team won second place for their project focused on developing “brownfield” sites such as old power plants and factories into “greenfield” sites for AI data centers.

Next year, Sun plans to learn more about clean energy and sustainable material. The biggest benefit of the MBA/MCS program, she said, is the chance to network with both business and climate leaders across industries.

Being in the Bay Area makes that even easier. “I chose Berkeley to be closer to the ecosystem,” Sun said. “I wanted to be closer to the climate community and the people who are doing real work here.”