Eli Seely

I went almost straight from graduation to being deployed to Iraq with a US Army Civil Affairs Unit. I came back into the middle of the Great Recession and struggled to find full-time employment, cobbling together odd jobs and “internships” to supplement the savings from my deployment. I also volunteered on several political campaigns. I was deployed again to the Horn of Africa in 2014. Upon my return, I enrolled the University of Washington’s Master of Public Administration program. I did a proper internship with Northwest SEED (now Spark Northwest), a clean energy non-profit, as well as a performance measurement capstone project for Seattle City Light. After graduating, I spent five years in sustainability with Clackamas County, Oregon, before finally moving to my current role doing data analysis, performance measurement, and program planning in the Spills program at the Washington Department of Ecology.