Sustainability Minor Series: Ena Yamaguchi

Welcome back to our Sustainability Minor Series, where we highlight Minerva students who are weaving sustainability into their studies and beyond. This week, we're featuring Ena Yamaguchi, a Social Sciences student from Japan in the class of 2028.

Sustainability Before Minerva

Ena has been building her own sustainable fashion brand since high school. She also completed design and consultancy internships along the way. So by the time she arrived at Minerva, sustainability was already part of how she worked and thought.

Her focus sits within an industry where the stakes are high. Globally, the fashion sector accounts for around 10% of annual carbon emissions, and an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste are generated each year.

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Why the Sustainability Minor

Minerva’s Sustainability Minor added academic depth to that. Ena studies Social Sciences and is most interested in psychology, particularly the link between environmental well-being and personal happiness. The minor lets her bring in knowledge from other fields, too. 

"What I appreciate most about this minor is that it expands my perspective by encouraging me to make connections across diverse disciplines," she says. 

It draws from Arts & Humanities and Natural Sciences, so she isn't limited to one way of thinking.

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Career Goals

Ena wants to inspire people to make sustainability part of their daily lives, not as a chore, but as something that genuinely improves how they live. She has the hands-on experience, but she says she hasn't been able to picture a specific career yet. The minor is helping with that, especially in areas like ethics, culture, and human psychology.

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Projects and Internships

In her freshman year in San Francisco, Ena's team partnered with global architecture firm Gensler on a Civic Project. The focus was on textile waste, specifically sample materials left over from the year before.  In the U.S. alone, millions of tons of textiles end up in landfills annually, with only a small fraction recycled.

What she took away from it was how quickly one problem can become many. 

"I learned how tackling a single problem can ultimately reveal a complex system of interconnected factors, such as policy, community, and the diversity of textiles," she says.  She also worked with media company Sustainable Brands Japan, where she saw how much social media can shift people's motivation to act sustainably.

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What's Next: Fashion, Culture, and the Capstone

For her Capstone, Ena wants to look at how different cultures approach sustainability based on their values and traditions. Fashion is her entry point. 

"I am particularly excited about discussing how my classmates from various upbringings experience and envision sustainability in their home countries," she says. 

She doesn't have a final concept yet, but the thread is there. The clothes people wear and the cultures they grew up in shape how they see themselves and relate to others. Ena wants to understand that and use it to think about what a sustainable world can look like across different places.

This blog post is part of Minerva’s ongoing Sustainability Minor Series. Stay tuned for more student spotlights.

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