Meet Prajawal, a Master of Sustainability student turning a family farm insight into a business built around helping companies choose to reuse. She shares how the degree is giving her the tools to make that vision a reality.
I came to the University of Sydney knowing exactly what I wanted to build and needing the academic foundation to back it. The University's reputation as Australia's oldest and one of the highest-ranked universities gave me confidence in the program's rigour. Equally important was the calibre of people it attracts, professionals with real industry experience, meaning the learning would happen inside and outside the classroom.
The idea started on my father's farm in Thailand. I was working as a food waste consultant at the time and visiting the farm regularly. Watching conventional farming strip the soil of life made something click.
Waste was being treated as an endpoint when it could be a starting point. I wanted to understand how circular systems could scale beyond agriculture and into every industry.
The Master of Sustainability was built around exactly that question. The 1.5-year structure meant I could move quickly, and a capstone project where I could build something real, not just study it, made the decision easy.
Being proactive has been the biggest skill I've developed, and the degree rewards that.
The capstone, without question. In most degrees, you pick a lane and stay in it.
Here I've worked on microplastics research, conducted a Life Cycle Assessment on reused construction materials, and developed a startup concept, all within the same program.
The interdisciplinary cohort is what makes that possible. When you're working alongside people from finance, engineering, urban planning and agriculture, you stop looking for single-discipline solutions to sustainability problems, because you quickly learn there aren't any.
I'm building a carbon accounting methodology to measure the emissions saved when businesses choose to reuse commercial products rather than buy new ones. The problem I kept running into is that businesses want to make sustainable choices but have no credible way to quantify the impact. My capstone is trying to fix that, so that circularity has a defensible, reportable figure that can hold up in an ESG report or boardroom conversation
I'm building a marketplace where businesses can buy and sell reusable commercial resources, starting with construction equipment and materials. What makes it different is that every transaction comes with a calculated carbon saving attached. Businesses aren't just cutting costs by choosing to reuse, they're generating verified environmental value that they can stand behind and report on. The circular economy already makes financial sense. I want to make it the default.
Come in with industry experience and a problem you genuinely care about solving. The program gives you the frameworks to understand sustainability across systems, and that knowledge lands differently when you already have a professional context to apply it to.
Reach out to your professors early, use every elective wisely, and treat the university as a launchpad. The students who get the most out of this degree are the ones who bring something real into it.
Being proactive has been the biggest skill I've developed, and the degree rewards that. Taking the initiative to collaborate with researchers outside my core faculty led to building a rapid detection model for microplastics in soil and presenting at the 80th SWCS International Annual Conference in California, representing the University of Sydney.
The elective flexibility in this program is something I'd highlight to any prospective student. It opened doors I didn't expect, connecting me with professors across the faculty and beyond, whose research thinking significantly shaped my own. That kind of cross-faculty mentorship is something you don't find in every program, and it's made a real difference to the quality of work I've been able to produce.
Technically, I've built depth in life cycle assessment, carbon accounting, and research methodology. The most transferable thing I'm taking into my next role is knowing how to turn a question into something you can defend to experts and then build on.
