Text version of video - STEM Career:  Environmental Engineer

(music)

(text on screen)

Science Technology Engineering Mathematics

STEM Career Connections

(engineer narration)

My name is Alesandra Agresti, and I'm an environmental engineer.

(music)

Environmental engineers work on a variety of engineering projects.  The goal of all of them is to improve the environment.  They range from storm water design, waste water treatment, drinking water quality.

(engineer talking to others) “…and then we're going to connect the manholes with leachate pipe.”

(engineer narration)

Science, technology, engineering and math come up every day in my job.  Science plays a big role in understanding a lot of the factors that go into water, understanding the chemistry and biology of the factors. Technology comes into place with the modeling that we do to understand how the water can flow, or how we treat it.  Engineering, obviously it's the design, figuring out what we need to do to fix the problem.  And then math, again, comes into factors of the design, so understanding demands or loads and being able to calculate them.

I learned how to be an environmental engineer by going to Bucknell University and studying environmental and civil engineering.  Being an engineering student is really hard, but it's also really rewarding.  You take a lot of classes because you have a lot of topics you need to learn, but you also get to take a lot of labs.  For somebody who much prefers to be doing an experiment than sitting and writing a paper, being an engineer is definitely a better route to go.

One of the coolest projects I've done as an engineer, is I worked in Suriname which is a small country between the Guyanas in South America.  A Bucknell alumni worked in the Peace Corps there and she lived in this little village called Tumaipa, which is a small village of about 300 people which didn't have any electricity or running water.  And she noticed that the people in the village, which is a lot of children and a lot of women specifically, were doing their dishes, showering, brushing their teeth and going to the bathroom all in the same area.  That's obviously not sustainable or a clean way to live, so she contacted us at Bucknell to see if we could come up with a better solution.

We went down there in January where I surveyed the area and really tried to get an assessment of the existing conditions.  We took samples of the water.  We surveyed elevation so we could see if it would be possible for water to flow, and we got a general idea of the community.  One of the most important parts of this project was understanding the social customs.  We wanted to make sure that anything we installed would work with the way the community went.  We had to make sure that it didn't require electricity and we had to make sure that it didn't require plumbing or pipes because there was nothing there.

So we went back to Bucknell and we came up with a couple different options.  At the end we put our project together and we submitted the proposal to the Davis Projects for Peace fund and the Clinton Global Initiative.  We ended up winning a 10,000 dollar grant which allowed us to go back after we graduated and actually construct the drinking water portion.  The main thing we wanted to do is change their lives and make it healthier and safer for everybody, so we thought the best way to do that was improve the quality of the water that they drink. If you're in high school and you think you want to be an engineer, obviously you want to study and work hard, but I think the other thing to really do is have some unique experiences.  If you have the chance to volunteer, if you have the chance to travel, if you have the chance to work in a unique group, try and do it.  Figure out what you want to do, and figure out what you like.  If you can take what you like and combine it with a job or combine it with a major, you're going to be the happiest.

The favorite part of my job is seeing how so many different moving pieces can come together.  My other favorite part of my job is, obviously, improving the environment, being it's really important that we can come up with sustainable solutions for our everyday lives and we can make sure that our kids and our kids' kids will have the world that we live in now.