Potable Water Pump Station Design by Wyatt

Potable Water Pump Station Design by Wyatt - July 2017 Scholarship Essay

In June of 2017 I graduated from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) and received my bachelor's degree in environmental engineering. My current occupation for the summer is at Carollo Engineers in Seattle, Washington as an engineering intern. I will be back in San Luis Obispo to start my master's degree in civil and environmental engineering starting in September.

If I were to give a TED talk it would be about how to design a potable water pump station. During my senior year at Cal Poly, the environmental engineering senior class has a senior design class for two quarters. The class was split up into teams of nine students and we were tasked to design (30% design) a wastewater treatment plant for the city of Cayucos, California. One of the first steps to designing the treatment plant is to determine how the wastewater is going to be collected and sent to the wastewater treatment plant. The next step is to determine where the treated water is going to go after it leaves the plant and how the water is going to get there.

Potable water is what is coming from the treatment plant and that is where the potable water pump station design comes in. I think that this topic is very interesting because one engineer is capable of designing a pump station by themselves instead of having an entire team to rely on. Pump station design also requires many different aspects of engineering: civil, environmental, mechanical, and electrical. Ever since starting engineering classes at Cal Poly I have been interested in any topics that have to do with water and how water moves. Pump station design involves a lot of water hydraulics and hydrology.