Colorado State University’s sustainable water interdisciplinary minor, SWIM, is composed of 23 enrolled students and 43 alumni. This niche program allows students flexibility in their courses while studying different approaches to water topics.
“It’s really that unique blend, that interdisciplinary nature, taking aspects from different thought processes and different subject areas and combining them together to give people a good, wide sense of the subject matter of water,” said Ryan Deming, a minor adviser for CSU’s school of global environmental sustainability.
Karen Schlatter, interim director of the Colorado Water Center, said SWIM was created as a way to accommodate students who wished to take a wide variety of water courses. The minor provides something for students to show that reflects their hard work and interests relating to various water topics.
“I could go out and take a bunch of different courses that I thought were interesting that were related to water, but if there’s nothing associated with that, then it’s not as beneficial to the student,” Schlatter said. “It was important for the Water Center to make that an official minor program.”
SWIM is composed of a variety of students in different majors from across CSU’s campus. Deming said minors like this — in which students are exposed to an array of people from different backgrounds — can provide a leg up in the development of career-related skills.
“The ability to work with people from a different discipline, the learning from someone who’s got a different thought process than you, that sort of experience of working across disciplines are all highly, highly valuable going outside of college,” Deming said.
“Particularly now in the world that we live in, especially in the Western U.S. but all across the world, we are experiencing increasing water scarcity (and) increasing demands on water with growing populations and different uses. Water is always going to be relevant.” –Karen Shlatter, Colorado Water Center interim director
Deming also touched on the importance of studying subjects that emphasize one’s personality, not just experience in fields that are relevant to their major. He explained that many employers are looking for a candidate who showcases their other interests, in addition to a sleek resume.
“A lot of times, interviews are more about getting to know you as a person than it is talking specifically about your qualifications,” Deming said. “And so having that sort of interesting part to even just talk about can really help a student set themselves apart.”
Branch DeMersseman, a senior civil engineering student minoring in SWIM, has experienced this firsthand.
“I’ve done internships, and they have said that when they were reviewing applications, seeing that I had to take the extra step to get more involved in water as a focus has helped them choose me over other applicants,” DeMersseman said. “It’s helped me achieve a more specialized job in my field.”
Robert Lamm, a fourth-year environmental engineering student, said SWIM provided him with a new lens to look through not only in regard to his major but also life in general.
“(SWIM is) going to help me really promote the importance of sustainability,” Lamm said. “It helps me go beyond just engineering. It helps me really see the ecological side (and) the restorative side, and it really helps me actually be a true environmental engineer.”
SWIM does more than just help individuals diversify their academic skill set; it also helps students grasp water-related situations occurring in the world around us.
“Knowing the context around water in Colorado has been very helpful and very eye-opening for me,” DeMersseman said. “Just having that baseline, I feel, has been very useful in helping me to interpret the news.”
Due to the prominence of water within Colorado’s landscape, understanding water studies in relation to real-life events can be helpful to all residents of Colorado.
“Particularly now in the world that we live in, especially in the Western U.S. but all across the world, we are experiencing increasing water scarcity (and) increasing demands on water with growing populations and different uses,” Schlatter said. “Water is always going to be relevant.”
Reach Mckenna Van Voris at science@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
