Study Abroad Reflection
01 Stockholm Study Abroad
>> I was standing at the edge of a cliff, watching small sailing ships emerge over the horizon, coming home to harbor after their day out on the Baltic Sea. The sun was setting behind the city skyline of Gamla Stan (literally “Old Town” in Swedish), and in its final hour, it threw ribbons of color across the sky. A plane had carried me to Stockholm, on the budget of Smith College, to give me the remarkable opportunity to spend six months studying the intersection of engineering and sustainability.
Glancing to my right, I saw the cliffs that host a whole city on their backs, and inside of which the city of Stockholm has buried their water sanitation facilities. I saw beneath the concrete and the topsoil, into the vast network of pneumatic shoots that carry waste sorted out into three levels of recyclables and one for refuse. Their district heating pipes flowed too, ensuring efficient and sustainable heating of their homes.
In the distance stretched cranes outlined in gold by the falling sun, cranes which were leading a project to prepare the city for an influx of stormwater. Climate change modeling had projected that increased snowmelt from early springs and drastic winters would flood the area if measures were not taken, and the city had made it a financial priority to address it early on.
I was standing at the cusp of a city that truly valued and prioritized making a world with the power to sustain the oncoming storms. Many minds came together, each with their own small piece of the puzzle, and hands got to work. I want, more than pretty much anything, to spend my life being one of those minds, a pair of those hands.
This is why I chose to pursue my concentration in the environment, and why I keep taking classes in complex systems and sustainable design in parallel with my electrical engineering courses. In electronics, Kirchhoff's Voltage Law simply states that the voltages around a closed loop of wiring must total to zero. It is a fundamental, physical property of energy, which dictates that all the components in a circuit, no matter how big or how complicated, must stay in harmony with each other. I want to spend my life helping organizations and companies–their devices, systems, and services– stay in a similar harmony, ensuring that our net demand is not greater than what the Earth gives.
Moreover, I want to someday look out across my homeland of America and see the equivalent of those Swedish golden cranes on the horizon, and know that I played a part in getting them there; to know that the gifted plane ticket was paid back in full, in the sustainable future I helped to shape.