Your Biggest Competitive Advantage Is Your Authentic Self feat. Takeya Green ‘22

Owl Have You Know

From the moment Takeya Green stepped off the plane to visit Rice, she knew Houston was the city for her. The Chicago native earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After getting her undergraduate degree in 2014, she joined Dow, in Freeport, TX, as a lead production engineer. She then joined Olin as a site logistics engineer in 2017, where she led an operations team of 40+ people.

After graduating in 2022, Takeya joined Citi as an investment banking associate in Houston, Texas. She works for the oil and gas and clean energy sectors.

With our host Scott Gale ‘19, Takeya shares her incredible journey from the chemical engineering lecture halls of a top-ranked program to the control rooms of world-scale chemical manufacturing facilities and from NRG Stadium cheering for the Houston Texans to now an investment banking career focused on clean energy.

She also reflects on being a Black woman in the STEM fields and overcoming the challenges placed in front of her, to being honored this year by the Texas Business Hall of Fame as a local leader.

The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

On being your authentic self

23:55 - I really firmly believe your biggest competitive advantage is your authentic self because people are not okay with being themselves...it's such a freeing experience, and not everyone gets to experience it because people are really scared to be themselves. They are afraid of whatever consequences they've built up in their head. And so that is my motto, like, just be yourself. You're enough.

Your authentic self is your superpower

21:45 - Your biggest competitive advantage is your authentic self. Nobody can be you. That is your superpower.

On winning an award from the Texas Business Hall of Fame

37:34 - Going there to be around a caliber of people that I never thought I would ever, I wouldn't say I never thought I'd be around, but to actually be 31 years of age and have that much access to millionaires and billionaires of Texas? And be able to have that opportunity is phenomenal. This is why I say I, I feel like I was supposed to be living here in Houston.

On living in Houston

03:47 - I ended up doing Dow because I wanted to live in Houston. Houston has always been a city that, out of all the cities I ever went to, I just felt like I was supposed to be here.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Takeya Green on LinkedIn

Check out this episode featuring Professor Anastasia Zavyalova here: https://business.rice.edu/owlhaveyouknow/season-3-episode-10