Katherine’s Internship Experience at Grounded

My name is Katherine and I am an incoming junior Environmental Engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh. This week concludes my six-week internship at Grounded Strategies. I have enjoyed spending the past six weeks contributing in various ways ranging from working on online research to designing and building a “Gnome Home”.

This internship has provided me with a wide variety of learning and career development opportunities. As I performed research for Grounded’s Gnome Messaging Project, I had the opportunity to utilize some of this research to draw my own conclusions and write a blog post about sustainability education. Through my research and blog post, I learned a lot of interesting information about messaging sustainability that translates to my everyday life as I attempt to educate others effectively and respectfully, while learning from others simultaneously. This research has helped to shape my approach toward this topic.

I am also fortunate to have hands-on experience at Grounded Strategies. I have been given the opportunity to design and construct a “Gnome Home”. Prior to this internship, I had no experience using power tools and no design experience. As an aspiring environmental engineer, this kind of experience is vital. Although the form of design experience I had at Grounded is very different from much of the design I will be doing in the future, there are many things I will take with me from this experience in regards to the engineering design process.

With my time at Grounded quickly coming to a close, I am grateful for all that I have learned during this time and for the experiences that I can bring with me on my journey to discover my chosen career path.