School of Engineering

Below is Randi's full passage should it be used: When I left home for college, I felt I was lacking purpose and direction. It took me a few years to figure out that I needed to do something meaningful to me. My hometown, like many small towns along the California coast, was under a building moratorium, and we couldn’t add any new homes with septic systems because we relied on groundwater for our drinking supply. Community meetings became heated, residents stressed, and state fines were threatened. This was personal for me, and I decided to take on solving the problem as a professional goal. I had been studying an engineering discipline that I didn’t connect with at another university, and I decided to switch to the ERE program at HSU. Once at Humboldt, I found my niche in water resources, computational analyses, groundwater simulation, and optimization. I used my “hometown problem” wherever I could in homework assignments, sizing bio-reactors, tertiary wetlands, and imagined groundwater contamination plumes. This was my period of commitment, getting involved, becoming a part of the engineering community and building my “tool box” for the future. I became connected to water and water-related issues. Serendipitously, my housemate was a part-time Trinity River rafting guide and frequently invited me on trips when a seat became available on a guided trip. Prior to graduation, I started working for the U.S. Forrest Service at the Redwood Sciences Laboratory in Arcata. I worked with watershed research scientists supporting projects in the area and honing my knowledge about environmental data, electronic sensors, data collection, data sanitization, and data management. I enjoyed this work and research, and it motivated to me pursue a master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis, which I completed in 2007. In 2001, I started working for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the Planning Division in Sacramento. I was part of a team responsible for system-wide planning, modeling development, and application for the Federal Central Valley water project in California. This type of modeling can assess water delivery, reservoir storage conditions, and ability to meet regulatory and environmental obligations under historical hydrology or some altered future climate conditions. I frequently worked on teams with other agencies, and some of my colleagues working for the California Department of Water Resources on the State Water Project are also ERE graduates! In 2005, I joined the Operations office where I am currently working. My position supports real-time reservoir management where I provide operational outlooks or forecasts for reservoir storage conditions, river releases, water allocation, and seasonal water temperature management to protect endangered fisheries. My office manages operations of Shasta, Trinity, Whiskeytown, Folsom, and New Melones reservoirs. I frequently work with regulatory agencies, the agricultural community, and fishery agencies to balance water resources needs in the system. If this type of work is intriguing to you, join Professor Beth Eschenbach’s ENGR 445 class, which makes a field trip to my office and includes a presentation on Central Valley Project operations. My advice to current ERE students is to choose something meaningful and follow it. Although in the beginning I thought I would be modeling groundwater for my small hometown, instead I have ended up helping manage one of the largest water resources projects in the state and the country. I also try to connect to the water and see the resources in action outside of work. This summer I completed a 65- mile canoe trip down the Sacramento River, and I also met a goal to float a portion of every river system that my office manages!