Let me be the first to tell you CONGRATULATIONS on your admission to the University of Oklahoma! I distinctly remember the day I received my admission packet in the mail and how it felt to know where I would be spending the next four years of my life. I was the first person in my immediate family to attend a four-year university, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew that my visits to OU made me feel at home and excited for the next chapter in my life. Little did I know, I was making a fantastic decision in choosing OU both as the foundation for my adult life and as the launch point for my future career. I could not recommend my alma mater more.
My name is Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, a serial resources entrepreneur from Choctaw, Oklahoma. I am currently doing a stint in federal government and live in Washington, D.C. I am a proud Sooner who graduated from OU in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in petroleum engineering. Over the last seven years, I have raised and deployed more than $1 billion into greenfield and brownfield natural resources projects around the globe. I currently serve as the Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials at the U.S. Department of Energy, actively deploying over $10 billion in investment into the battery supply chain via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL 40207b/c) and Inflation Reduction Act (48C).
In 2020, I was honored with a full-page spread in Forbes Magazine as the featured Energy award winner of Forbes 30 Under 30. In 2021, I was chosen as a 2021 Oil & Gas Investor Forty under 40 award winner and one of the top 25 women in business in DFW by Dallas Business Journal. In 2022, my husband and I welcomed our first child, Lola Forbes. It has been a wonderful whirlwind.
While I was at OU, I didn’t waste a minute: I majored in petroleum engineering and was also very involved on campus. I loved being involved in the Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth (where I caught the entrepreneurship bug!), organizing campus programming through the Campus Activities Council, and attending Honors College events (I studied abroad in both China and Oxford with the Honors College group), and getting involved in the student body. Although academic distinction was what I attended OU to achieve, I ended up learning and growing just as much from my fellow classmates outside the classroom. The lifelong friends I made at OU all had completely different experiences at the university, which is one of the many things that make my alma mater great. The campus is large enough to accommodate an openness of thought, activities, and opportunities, but small enough to feel like home. I am confident that if you choose to attend the University of Oklahoma that you, too, will craft your own unique, amazing experience and become one of the long lines of Sooners that make our university great.
Best of luck with your decision and I truly hope that you will join the OU Family.
Boomer!
