Water Quality Technology and Hazardous Materials Management
The Department of Environmental Studies and Planning at Sonoma State University offers a program in Water Quality Technology and Hazardous Materials Management for students seeking employment in industry, private consulting firms, government regulatory agencies, and governmental agencies which treat drinking water, waste water, solid waste, and hazardous waste.
The program is broadly based to prepare students for careers in all aspects
of public health and water quality. The students take courses from many
different departments on our campus including
microbiology and toxicology from the Biology Department, hydrology from
the Geology Department, and lots of chemistry. They take math and computer
science. They also have many courses in environmental science in their
home department, ENSP. The students have their choice of taking a Bachelor
of Arts or a Bachelor of Science. The B.S. students take more science and
math courses, including physics and a year of calculus. The B.A. students
take one semester of computer science; the B.S. students take two semesters.
If students start taking the B.S. program when they are freshmen or sophomores,
they can graduate in four years, but if they enter the program as juniors,
it often takes them an extra year to get all the science courses needed
for the B.S.
Originally, we had only a B.A. program, and some graduates told us that they felt they had trouble finding work, because they were not Bachelors of Science. We have now had about a decade to watch the graduates, and we have observed that the B.S. and B.A. students find work at the same rate and take similar jobs. The best reason to take the B.S. program is because it provides an even better scientific foundation, which helps the graduates understand the environmental problems which cause hazardous materials to be released that contaminate people and cause water and soil pollution. The classes in calculus and physics are especially helpful because our graduates work with engineers who often think and express themselves in calculus. A small set of new regulatory positions in state and local government are only open to B.S. graduates.
The largest number of jobs available to our graduates are as wastewater or drinking water operators. There is a serious shortage of these people in the U.S. today. The jobs are well paid, have good benefits, they are interesting, and they are important for environmental quality. We have many graduates who do this work and one of the good things about it is that there is room for advancement without going to graduate school, by learning on the job and taking correspondence courses.
Our graduates in the past have been most interested in working as investigators for federal, state, regional, and local environmental agencies. We have had a few graduates work for the USEPA and a few for California EPA. Many work for the Regional Water Quality Control Boards in California. All of these positions are open to people with a bachelors of science degree. We also have graduates who work for county and city environmental health departments, which generally require a year of graduate study at a university which has a school of public health. A small but growing group of graduates work for cities as industrial wastewater inspectors, insuring that toxic materials are not put into the public sewers. We have graduates who are uniformed fire officials who make sure that every factory or agency which handles toxic or explosive materials has good practices to avoid problems and reliable plans if something goes wrong.
A small group of our graduates work for medium and large corporations. Some of them operate the machinery which purifies the air and wastewater from industrial pollutants. Others work as in house health and safety officers. Still others are environmental compliance managers who make sure that the company is obeying all of the environmental laws, and who manage the hazardous materials at the factory. We have had two graduates who worked for the General Accounting Office of the U.S. Congress, which does detective work to see how the federal laws are being followed and how the federal funds are being used.
We also have a number of graduates who work in small engineering firms which serve the public agencies and the large private corporations. Some of these firms specialize in cleaning up polluted water and soil. Others give technical advice. For example we had a graduate who travels around the US giving advice to small, impoverished towns and Indian reservations about how to purify their drinking and wastewater. Some firms do the same kinds of inspections as the regulatory agencies but without fines. The opportunities available to graduates of this program are varied indeed.