Anyone who thinks the climate crisis is an unsolvable problem needs to begin by imagining it otherwise, says Mansirat Khinda, whose Clean Career Compass won Urban Climate Leadership’s recent Clean Economy Youth Challenge.

A Grade 12 student at Sullivan Heights Secondary in Surrey, British Columbia, 18-year-old Khinda won the challenge with her Clean Career Compass, an interactive website designed to help teenagers dig into the many great careers that await them in the fast-accelerating clean economy.

Young people looking to “make [their] career green” can check out Khinda’s five designated categories: Science + Innovation, Energy & Environment, Technology + coding, Oceans & Nature, and Engineering & Systems.

Under each heading they will find an approachable hook (“Curious about how things work?” or “Love tech, coding, or problem-solving?” or “If you care about nature and the environment …”) followed by helpful notes about sample careers, salaries and demands, and “why it matters.”

Teens’ actual experience very much drove her decision to turn her Clean Career Compass into a website, Khinda told The Energy Mix in an interview.

Such a platform, she said, “meets teenagers where they are most active, online,” and “pairing the site with a social media campaign, the idea becomes widely accessible and easy to share.

“The website format also allows for simple conversion into QR codes, giving me multiple ways to distribute and promote the project,” Khinda added.

Her compass is also a direct response to what her intelligence gathering (through direct questions to peers as well as indirectly through social media) told her about how teens view jobs in the clean economy.

A lack of awareness about the kinds of jobs available, and misconceptions about salary, demand, and impact are key reasons that so many teens aren’t leaving high school primed to plan for green careers, she found.

As for why teens should choose such a career, Khinda’s Clean Career Compass’ home page is clear: real world impact, strong job security, and highly transferable skills.

The compass offers a quiz to help students get a clearer sense of who they might become in the green economy. Khinda said she also intends to add a section detailing educational pathways to specific careers.

She said she’ll use the $2,000 she won for the Clean Career Compass to secure a domain name for the project and share the site first with other schools in Surrey, then possibly “all across Vancouver.”

The Mix’s interview with Khinda ended with what she described as a “really silly story” that she thought was “quite relevant,” beginning with her belief that she is “really, really, really bad at math.”

One day, Khinda’s math teacher told her class a true story about a student in some other math class in some other place who arrived late, and copied down two problems on the board that he assumed were homework. He went home and was able to solve one of the two (heinously difficult) problems that night.

Returning to class the next day, he told his teacher he had solved one of the problems.

The teacher replied, astonished, that he had posted the two problems to the board as examples of “unsolvable” problems, and that, unsurprisingly, none of the other students had even tried.

“What kind of idiot would spend hours trying to fix the unsolvable?” Khinda laughed.

Today, the student who was able to solve a brain-bending math problem because it never occurred to him that it could not be solved is “a globally famous mathematician,” Khinda said.

Her “head and heart were so motivated” by the story that she “ended up with a 95” in her math class.

What Khinda took away from that experience was that seemingly impossible problems are solvable—but first, you have to believe it.

She approaches the climate crisis with the same attitude: “If I can treat this as a solvable problem, it’s a solvable problem.”