Bellflower Ct at Case Western Reserve University. Photo by Abdullah AlManayes.
I recently attended a Civil and Environmental Engineering meeting at Case Western Reserve University. A professor introduced us to the different academic tracks within the department, while current students spoke about the internships, projects, and other opportunities they had pursued while at Case.
What interested me was how quickly the boundaries between each area started to blur.
Environmental engineering can involve water systems, infrastructure, chemistry, biology, and several other areas depending on the problem being addressed. Even its relationship with civil engineering is closely connected. The professor described the field as dynamic, and as we moved through the different tracks and their overlaps, that description began to make a lot more sense. There was room to move between different interests without necessarily leaving the discipline behind.
The students' experiences made that more tangible. Despite studying within the same department, they had pursued very different internships and projects. Their coursework gave them a foundation, but what they did with it depended on the problems and opportunities they chose to pursue. I liked the idea of an academic path that could extend into so many different kinds of work while still working toward the same larger purpose.
I think that flexibility is especially important when looking at climate change. Its effects extend to water, infrastructure, ecosystems, cities, and the resources we depend on. These systems do not exist independently, so addressing the problems affecting them cannot always belong neatly to one area either. Sometimes the solution may involve biology. Somewhere else, it may involve infrastructure.
I want to be part of that change. What excites me about environmental engineering is not simply that there are many things I can do within it, but that those different directions can be used to address the same problems from completely different angles. I can follow the parts of science and engineering that interest me while still working toward the environmental problems I care about. The meeting gave me a clearer picture of what that can actually look like.
