So what do you do in your role in Stamford?
The role I have is in a nutshell a support role — a Swiss Army Knife position. I go where I’m needed most, and the duties will vary widely, ranging from office work to Excel work, doing tasks like figuring out properties that may be in our sewer system but not properly tracked, and doing contract inspections for contractors the city hires to rehabilitate manholes that are starting to have groundwater infiltration, which we don’t want to happen.

When you were at Unity College, is this where you saw yourself ending up?
When I first started with the major, I knew I was interested in the geosciences and in that sphere, but I didn’t know 100 percent where I was going to wind up, and I was open to a lot of different options at the time. I completed an internship at the DEP my junior year, which was fun, and I knew wastewater could be an option. So when I graduated, I sent an email to the city of Stamford saying “Hey, I’m a recent graduate, I’d like to get involved,” and they said they had a temporary position available. But it turned out to be permanent.

How did your Unity College experience prepare you?
There was this very heavy emphasis on fieldwork and field experience with the EES program, but Unity also helped in ways you wouldn’t expect, as weird as that sounds. Some of the course work, which comes in handy, some of the hydrology has come up during my job, and some of the things I learned with Excel and Microsoft Office, which really are huge with what I do now.

And you know, just because of the way the world works, unexpected factors would come up all the time when working on projects. There’s always going to be something that happens where you’re like: “All right, how do we deal with this.” It prepared me to stay calm, take a step back, and see where you can go from here and figure out the situation, given the change in circumstances.

What would you say to someone in looking at Unity College’s Earth and Environmental Science Program?
It’s a great program, and if you’re going into that program, you’re going to learn a lot about a lot of different things. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be challenging, which it should be. If you’re in a major, and it’s an easy major, you’re going to be ill-prepared for life, because a job is most likely going to be challenging in some way, shape or form. At least, the kind of job you’ll want.