Environmental Engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZaYoZj4lbk&feature=youtu.be

I decided I wanted to be an Environmental Engineer when I was sixteen years old. I knew I wanted to be an engineer however hadn’t decided on what field I was going for. I thought of agricultural, biomedical or biomechanical but nothing seemed right.

One night I was researching random engineering websites when I came across environmental engineering. It combined my passion for science, math and the environment.

It seemed too good to be true. Sometimes it takes time to investigate and find your true passion. My uncle studied engineering at UBC and didn't know he wanted to study Accoustacle Engineering until his fourth year of school. He is now the Dean of Physics at a school in Qatar.

I am attending UBC September 2020 to start my engineering degree. I will move from the Kelowna Campus after my first two years to the Vancouver Campus to focus on the environmental part of my degree. Getting to this point in my life was a lot of work, however it was definitely worth it. I will graduate from the top three schools in Canada and top forty in the world. I would not have gotten this far without the goal of becoming an Environmental Engineer. I encourage any young student to research the career they are planning on studying and set a goal. I set my goal to be an engineer in grade ten and took classes such as science honours and Drafting and Design which gave me an advantage during the rest of highschool. 

Many students change their career goal while at university, College or Trade School. Having a career goal doesn’t mean that you are stuck in one profession your whole life, however it is much easier to switch majors when you're already accepted into a great school or have work experience at a great company.

I recommend you watch https://youtu.be/ztWHqUFJRTs - YouTube video explaining what and why climate change is.  

This video is helpful because as a student I was taught to fear global warming, ride a bike and only turn on lights if they are necessary. I am the type of person to have one light on the house that isn’t bright enough to “save the turtles,” then have the tv, my phone and laptop all plugged in fully charged or not in use. Carrying the knowledge of why our Earth is warming has more effect on us rather than fearing that maybe might happen in one thousand, two thousand, five million years.  

“The Earth loses 18.7 million acres of forests per year, which is equal to 27 soccer fields every minute” reported the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). We need forests to capture carbon dioxide for humans to survive.

“Restoring forests already chopped down in Brazil, [for example,] could draw about 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 out of the air,” reported National Geographic.  

Research done by The New York Times stated that, agriculture produces “574 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States each year and 56 million metric tons in Canada.” That is nearly “8 percent” of all greenhouse gasses produced by each country. “Cows, buffalo and sheep” produce the most amount of carbon dioxide because of the bacteria in their stomachs they use to digest foods. The demand must match the supply and we are demanding to have McDonalds burgers every day with a fancy steak dinner.  

The solution to this problem is reduction, we must cut the amount of livestock that is kept in the world. Engineer a Big Mac that tastes like meat but absorbs carbon dioxide while it is growing rather than producing it.  

In 2010 stat Canada reported that the female population of Canada is 17.2 million, that is 50.4%. However, engineers Canada recorded that “less than 13 per cent of practicing licensed engineers are women.”  

When my mother was in high school, she was one of two girls in physics 11 (prerequisite for any engineering course) out of a grad class of four hundred. Women in Engineering reported that, “In 1876, Elizabeth Bragg became the first woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in engineering,” followed by a handful of others in the upcoming decades. However, she never received the opportunity to work as a professional engineer and instead stayed home to be a mother and wife. Many women had to fight so that I could complain about having Physics, Chemistry, English and Calculus in the same semester. Women in the past have gone through schooling and did not receive a degree so that I could I look at a course selection, place my finger over anything and say, that’s what I’m going to be. Women of our generation and country need to appreciate the freedom we are given while deciding a career that other women have fought for.

While browsing google I looked up, “why aren’t there women engineer’s” and the answers that I endlessly clicked on were, because they don’t know that they can be. The fact that a girl cannot be an engineer is no longer true in Canada, in 2016, 20% of enrolled students studying engineering were women. The knowledge must be spread that being an engineer is not a gender-based career.  

An Environmental Engineer’s main focus is to regain and sustain healthy air, water and soil. A five-year university program that teaches the skills to scientifically ask why and how the environment functions. Finding new and better ways of recycling, waste disposal, and industrial hygiene. An environmental engineer will take a sample of soil from unfertile ground, ask why it is this way taking note of the surrounding climate, then ask how to improve it. They search the world for sustainable energy sources to ensure that fossil fuel will become obsolete in the upcoming years. Environmental Engineers research more accessible and less costly ways to live our everyday life. Another task an environmental engineer takes on is, predicting “the consequences of our projects before we dig, reroute, dump, exhaust, flush, funnel, plant, cut down, or build” reported, EducatingEngineers.com. Hired by companies to avoid damaging the environment while building or extracting substances from the earth. They are also hired by companies that are trying to take a greener approach to packaging and producing. Environmental engineers recognize the urgency to discover safer options to live that benefit the environment because Earth is slipping into irreversible damage to its environment. No medicine, technology or education will matter if we don’t have a world to live in to explore it. The world's atmosphere is perfect for humans to thrive. We have the perfect oxygen percentage in the atmosphere, land to water ratio and enough forestry to combat carbon dioxide if we take care of it. An Environmental Engineer’s goal is to protect that. 

Quote-https://educatingengineers.com/careers/environmental-engineer