My Practicum site was the Baltimore office of Sevenson Environmental Services, Inc. Sevenson is an environmental contractor that receives bids from companies or governments to clean up sites across the United States. I primarily worked on a bid related to a former chemical pesticide plant in Jacksonville, Florida. The site was highly contaminated with arsenic and TENORM, or technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material, and the company that owned it was concerned about these contaminants leaking out into the surrounding area, including the St. Johns River. As such, agencies like the EPA and the Florida Department of Wildlife were involved to ensure the safety of protected species like the manatee. I first became aware of Sevenson through someone I met who happened to work there. They explained what the company did and I thought it sounded like something I might like to be a part of. It ended up working out that they were hiring interns, so I submitted a resume and cover letter and was accepted. There was no special way in which I located my supervisor, it just happened that the company had an employee whose job is to oversee interns, and so it worked out fairly well. I would recommend that any future students reading this try every opportunity they come across. You never know when an opportunity is going to arise, even just in casual conversation with someone you meet, so pursue anything that seems like it could lead to a job opportunity.
At Sevenson I assisted with several tasks, including estimation of project costs, creation of project schedules, progress checks with clients, and communicating information to subcontractors when necessary. This was mostly for the site in Jacksonville, but I also did some work for another project in Calvert City. The science behind a lot of the work that we did for this project was based on things like chemical runoff and leaching, which are topics covered in SGC and other classes I’ve taken. However, my classes focused more on what the issues were, whereas my internship provided me with a lot more information on how the issues are fixed from a tactical standpoint.
This internship solidified my desire to more deeply study and potentially later practice in a field related to environmental policy. When working in many different areas of the United States, you have to be aware of policy on the local, state, and federal level to make sure project plans are remaining in compliance. This showed me how vital strong environmental policy is, even when it comes to those trying to solve environmental problems. Having to “jump through hoops” makes it harder for companies who want to pollute or otherwise harm the environment which, even if it makes it harder for companies to clean up said contamination, is very necessary to ensure that there is less contamination that needs to be cleaned up in the first place. Taking more classes related to environmental policy is absolutely something I’ll be doing over my last 2 years of college, but this was only reinforced by my experiences with my internship. Similarly, my interest in going into a career related to environmental policy has also been increased. I became aware of my interest in environmental policy during my time in ENSP102, by which time I had already secured my internship at Sevenson. I found the topics interesting, the history tumultuous, the work important, and most critically, I connected to it more than I did with general environmental science work. While I didn’t work directly with policy during my internship with Sevenson, seeing how the company interacted with it and how it shaped our responses reinforced the newly found interest I had in a career in that field.