Alumni

Brooke Wallery: JD Candidate, University of Illinois, ES Class of 2018

How did you decide to go to law school? Is it something you always wanted to do?I did not know I wanted to go to law school until after my first year of college. Over that first summer, I interned at my local Environmental Services Department in Texas and learned a lot about how environmental laws impacted policy at the local level. That first year I also learned a lot about environmental justice movements and creative ways environmental lawyers could use the law to improve communities and promote equality.What do you want to do with your JD?Honestly, I am still working to figure that out!...

Joanna Pupa, Lab Technician 2 at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, ES Class of 2017, Double major in Chemistry

What is your current job title, and what do you do on a normal day?My current title is Lab Technician 2. There are quite a few tests that we run in the laboratories, and we tend to switch every week. Some of our analyses are calculating suspended solids within samples, calculating total solids within samples, pH, alkalinity of samples, biological oxygen demand of samples, total nitrates, total phosphates within samples, etc. Every day, we receive samples collected at various plants in the Greater Chicago area, and then we test them according to their requested analyses. We then create a lab...

Nidhi Shastri, AIR New Voices Scholar 2021 | Business Analyst at Axiom Law | Science Researcher - Underknown | Creator - Model Minority

What do you do on a typical day at Axiom, as well as with your podcasts, writing, and research?During the day, I work full-time in the legal industry on business development for a company called Axiom. This involves a lot of communications – cold calling, brainstorming outreach to diverse legal teams, and handling marketing inbound leads for the company.In the evenings/on weekends, I work on my various freelance jobs in the media industry. As an independent podcaster, I research and produce episodes of my personal podcast (Model Minority: Uniquely American) and script write/clip audio for MIT...

Sarah Kater, Conservation Officer, Illinois Department of Natural Resources and ES Alum

Sarah Kater, Conservation Officer, Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability Alum

What do you do on a typical day as a Conservation Police Officer?Your day is always different, especially depending on the seasons. You do compliance checks, checking fishermen, hunters, boaters... You utilize different vehicles to do enforcement and compliance checks. This may be your squad truck, a boat, an ATV, or a snowmobile. We do a lot of self-initiated activity, as well as responding to calls. How did you get to where you are since you graduated from Illinois?After graduating from high school, I looked at the job requirements to be a Conservation Police Officer. I tailored my...

Samuel James, Solutions Engineer at Axim Geospatial and ES Alum

Samuel James, Solutions Engineer at Axim Geospatial and Environmental Sustainability Grad

What do you do in a typical day at Axim Geospatial?It’s hard to define a typical day at Axim. I support more than 25 clients and often work on multiple client projects within a day. Our clients range from state or local government entities to international NGOs and from small businesses to multi-national corporations. There are also non-profit organizations sprinkled into our client portfolio.The diversity of clients and their needs makes each project unique, which makes each day unique. For one client, I could build an enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) in the cloud or on-premise...

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