I should put this in a cover letter someday

I'm listening to a lecture on green architecture and the speaker just said that there's no discipline that actually looks at the interactions between ecology and cities. There is! That's what I'M studying! Fine, I haven't quite learnt much about the city side of the story (since I've chosen to focus on water as my final year subjects) but I've spent quite some time on ecology subjects and then on management in terms of dealing with humans and regulations. And while they didn't spend much time teaching us the link between those two, I'm assuming that as I graduate and move on, each separate subject I learnt should work in tandem to help me in the work I'll do.

I once worked with a mature-aged Masters student on an environmental monitoring subject. He kept asking "What's the point of focusing on rivers when there's so much more to study? How is this applicable in the real world if I don't want to be involved with rivers?"And all the while, I assumed that this subject was teaching us the basics of environmental monitoring. Yes, the work we did was based on rivers but it's totally applicable to other regions.

To me that's what environmental engineering is about. In uni, we learn the basics by focusing on small topics. More importantly we learn that what they can teach us is a small part of the bigger picture and we need to be inventive with how we apply these lessons in the real world. So while my lessons are focused on environmental stuff (especially water), I guess the main message from my course that I'll take home with me is to think of everything in the world as a system and that fixing one thing here can cause another problem there (ie there's no simple solution to real world problems). And that covers how I'll approach the issue of the ecology of a city.

Oh and that while we can come up with amazing stuff, if it isn't explained well to the people lower down in the command chain it's kinda pointless. Heard that story so many times in the past couple of years....