As a SUNY-ESF student, my perspective on the environment is inseparable from my college experience. My classmates and I were discussing climate change and hydrofracking both in class and at parties. I had the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary groups, finding solutions from multiple perspectives. I found out there is no one way to be an environmentalist or an engineer.
By nature, engineering curricula are rigid sequences of courses with specific prerequisites. We didn’t really even get to see design work until junior year, as we were too busy taking physics, calculus and chemistry.
It would be easy to spend four years doing exactly what they told you to do. As engineering majors who entered college right before the recession really set in, we were told everyone who left this program who could walk and chew gum had a job when they graduated.
The world is less impressed with our degrees than it was four years ago. If you just follow the curriculum, you come out looking like everyone else. Fall semester of my junior year involved being physically unable to wake up to my alarm, a stress-induced back injury, wearing long johns as pants in public and panic attacks.
It was time to start approaching school differently. I needed to stop b*tching about all the math and start coming up with a plan.
I spent the last three semesters figuring out that I want to apply ecological engineering to local agriculture. I’m not getting a real engineering job. I am aiming to learn more about agriculture to effectively design for it. My job is working on a farm and I’m so excited, it’s almost embarrassing.
Caring this much leaves you so vulnerable. This career path is unorthodox and I expect to fail spectacularly before successfully implementing future designs. Approaching commercial agriculture as an ecosystem hasn’t really been done before.
That said, I value everything I’ve learned at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and in the environmental resources engineering department. They taught me the skills to analyze information and find the resources I need for problems I will encounter. My department is small enough that students and faculty genuinely care about the people around them, and for that, I am truly grateful.
Part of inventing my own way to be an environmental engineer was writing this column. This column gave me voice and I have sincerely appreciated all of my readers. It made me feel like I had the power to promote and discuss things that I cared about. I learned so much about writing to entertain and inform instead of solely for technical purposes.
I still feel like I’m infiltrating this hallowed Syracuse University institution. I don’t even go to this school. Why do I get to do this again?
You can’t wait for anyone to give you permission to be who you want to be. The environmental issues our generation faces are big and woolly. It’s your responsibility to figure out how you can contribute to the conversation and love it.
Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appeared every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu or followed on Twitter at @LeannaMulvihill.