Round Rock Resident Receives National Award from the Sierra Club

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Jessica Olson (center) stands with Sierra Club President David Scott (left) and Executive Director Michael Brune (right) after receiving the club's 2013 Joseph Barbosa Award. (Photo by Lucas Adams)

GEORGETOWN, TX (09/30/2013)(readMedia)-- Jessica Olson from Round Rock is among the recipients of the Sierra Club's 2013 national awards. Olson received the Joseph Barbosa Award, which recognizes Sierra Club members under the age of 30 and includes a $500 prize to further the recipient's work.

Olson is a senior at Southwestern University, where she is majoring in environmental studies and feminist studies. She became involved with the Sierra Club in 2011 after attending the PowerShift conference in Washington, D.C. That summer, she attended the Sierra Student Coalition's Summer Leadership Training Program known as SPROG.

Olson has interned with the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter, the club's Beyond Coal Campaign, and the Lone Star Clean Fuels Alliance. She spent three semesters coordinating the Lone Star Chapter's internship program, supervising a group of 12 interns.

Olson recently completed a term on the Sierra Student Coalition Executive Committee and was one of 12 students who were selected to represent the SSC as youth delegates to the United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP18, which was held in Doha, Qatar, in November 2012. Olson led several workshops at the conference and also blogged extensively from the conference to help others understand what was happening. She has already been selected to attend COP19, which will be held in Warsaw, Poland, this November.

At Southwestern University, Olson has been co-chair of the student environmental group on campus, which is called Students for Environmental Activism and Knowledge, or SEAK. In February 2013, she took three other Southwestern students with her to Washington, D.C., to participate in a rally for climate change that the Sierra Club supported. She is taking three Southwestern students to the 2013 PowerShift conference in in Pittsburgh, Pa., Oct. 18-21.

Olson spent the summer of 2013 teaching at Penn State's Environmental Center. She hopes to attend graduate school to study environmental science and policy and would eventually like to work in the area of environmental policy and advocacy as a lobbyist or perhaps even a negotiator for the United Nations.