Valentina Ortiz de Zárate

BS 2021 Civil Engineering, Environmental & Sustainability Studies Student-Defined Additional Major
MS 2022 Civil & Environmental Engineering

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Valentina Ortiz de Zárate became interested in environmental work at a young age. Her passion was set in motion with a desire to help endangered animals. She would raise money for organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, and through her interest, she began to develop a foundation in the environmental sciences. After realizing she wanted to be a problem-solver for issues like the ones she encountered in her environment and sustainability background, Ortiz de Zárate came to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to study civil engineering at the College of Engineering. Coming into CMU, her interests felt scattered. She knew she wanted to be an engineer but held a lot of interest in the humanities and policy side of environment and sustainability as well. As a result, she found herself taking environmental studies courses in conjunction with her engineering courses and eventually added a minor in environmental and sustainability studies, which then grew into an additional student-defined environmental and sustainability studies major. Finding the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program added interdisciplinarity to her courses, and she was finally able to connect her two interests. Flexibility in choosing many of her environmental and sustainability studies courses meant that Ortiz de Zárate could tailor her student-defined major to her engineering degree. This allowed her to build on her technical knowledge and step outside an engineering perspective. Ortiz de Zárate appreciated taking courses of other disciplines and approaching issues from a more critical thinking perspective. The interdisciplinary nature of the program led her to dive deeper into her Environmental and Sustainability Studies Senior Capstone as well.

The formation of Ortiz de Zárate’s senior capstone research question began when she was introduced to the issue of sewer overflow in her engineering courses. The Politics of Water: Global Controversies, Past and Present, a course which looks into the social and political aspects of water, helped solidify her focus on water issues. The course, taught by Professor Abigail Owen, had a final project in which Ortiz de Zárate chose to tackle through photography. The photos she used were noticeably successful, and she realized that the medium could act as a meaningful tool for communication. So for her Environmental and Sustainability Studies Senior Capstone, Ortiz de Zárate “decided to analyze and photograph… the problem of combined sewer overflow in the city of Pittsburgh.”¹ She was able to expand on her creative skills but also gained valuable knowledge within her primary major, especially in her ability to evaluate and communicate issues as an engineer. You can to read more about Ortiz de Zárate’s research project.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with an additional student-defined major in environmental and sustainability studies in 2021, Ortiz de Zárate also completed her master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering at CMU a year after. She found that throughout her graduate career, she kept the interdisciplinary habits taken from the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program and took courses of varying disciplines. She is now working as an environmental engineer for Eastern Research Group (ERG), a multidisciplinary environmental consulting firm, in Chantilly, Virginia. The importance of interdisciplinarity is ingrained in her, and Ortiz de Zárate hopes to continue tackling environmental and sustainability issues not only through engineering but with her camera as well. She is excited to apply her studies outside of the classroom and to continue her photography. She encourages current and future students pursuing the environmental and sustainability studies additional major and minor to think about the program as a complimentary degree, not a separate one, to your primary major and to use it as a way to expand on your interests.

¹ Valentina Ortiz De Zárate, “Visualizing an Overflowing Problem: How Can Images Inspire to Create Solutions to Urban Environmental Challenges,” 2020.