How to Use Your Creativity to Protect the Environment
Even if you’re not a climate scientist or technologist
In college, my definition of what counted as sustainable technology was pretty unsubtle. I wanted to work on electric cars or renewable energy plants, or nothing. Anything else didn’t count toward my goal of helping protect the environment through engineering.
A group of classmates and I started a project after class to design and prototype an engine that could be used to generate solar energy. Whenever someone tried to scope the project down to something we rookies could actually make, I resisted and argued to make the project more ‘environment-y’. I didn’t want to make a little table-top engine, I wanted to make a whole solar farm! Or else it wouldn’t count.
That I couldn’t motivate myself to make a smaller version of this project probably indicated that I wasn’t that interested in engines.
That project didn’t get very far, and not just because we couldn’t all agree on what exactly to build; we all got busy with schoolwork. I was simultaneously knee-deep in other engineering projects like this one.
I even got to intern at an electric car company in my fourth year. I worked on math models of the motors in electric cars, trying to improve their efficiency. When I…
