Kathryn shares her journey of faith, career, and purpose, reflecting on how her background and experiences shaped the path she chose.

How were you called to the Way?

I am a third-generation Christian in the Church. My grandparents and my parents were in the Church, so I grew up going to church and never really knew anything else.

But, like many people, I reached a point where I felt like my growth was stagnant, and I realized that I couldn’t become the kind of person I wanted to be on my own, that I needed the Holy Spirit to achieve the kind of fruit I wanted to have in my life. So, it became a natural decision of something that I’d known my whole life, but realizing that I needed to take that next step and commit to this way of life through baptism.

What is your line of work?

I’m an environmental engineer. I work for a research lab at a university, and we do a lot of applied research. We help communities try to make evidence-based decisions about improving their waste management systems and reducing plastic pollution that’s entering the environment.

I do a lot of international development work, including consulting with communities to help them develop plans to address their challenges around waste management and pollution.

What drew you to this field?

I think, like many high-achieving kids in high school, I thought about the medical field a lot. If you make good grades, people tend to think that’s what you should do. And I think that’s a wonderful career. I have a lot of really close friends who are in the medical field. But I reflected on that and realized I don’t really like blood. I don’t really like bodies.

And I really wanted to work on more systemic problems. I always really wanted to be able to use my career to help people. But I think engineering is really cool, because it allows you to solve those problems at scale. So many of the systems that give us the quality of life we have on a day-to-day basis are from these complex engineered infrastructure systems that kind of run underneath everything. We don’t even think about them until they stop working. Things like our clean drinking water or energy systems.

So, that was the driving factor of realizing that I really liked these big messy problems of working in systems. And I also was really excited about the scale at which I could potentially help people and make an impact.

What sort of education did you get to prepare for your career?

I have a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering and just finished my master’s degree in civil engineering.

Engineering doesn’t really require a master’s to get started. One nice thing about engineering is that a lot of master’s programs have fully funded research assistantships. But you really just need a bachelor’s degree to get started.

What has been your career path?

I toyed around with different ideas. But by the time I got to college, I knew that this is what I wanted to do. But that said, engineering is a really broad field. It was one of the reasons I picked it, because there’s a lot of flexibility. You can take it a lot of different directions. 

So, I did a lot of internships. When I was in college, I worked for an Environmental Education Center. I worked at a manufacturing plant doing environmental control. And then I interned at an engineering firm that I really enjoyed and that hired me for my first job.

So highly recommend internships as a way to feel out your career field and get a sense of what you’re actually interested in, even within one specific area.

And then I also did a lot of undergraduate research. I worked with a lot of different professors while I was in college. I’m a big believer that college is very much what you make of it, and you have to build the experience you want. So, I would find professors that were doing interesting work that I thought was exciting, and I would get involved with their labs as a research assistant.

What elements of your work do you enjoy?

There’s a lot of things about my job that I really enjoy. I get to travel to new places. I get to meet new people and experience new cultures. But it really comes back to doing work that feels meaningful and impactful.

I also really like my team. I think that makes a big difference. I have a really great boss who’s a good mentor to me, and who wants to see me succeed. And I think being in that kind of environment is also really valuable to your career growth as an early-career professional.

What are some of the elements of your job that are a challenge?

Being in this kind of consulting role, you’re doing a lot of recommending. But it’s ultimately up to the communities that we’re working with to actually do the implementation. So that can be difficult. 

Sometimes I think there are a lot of under-resourced areas that just don’t have the ability to move things forward in some scenarios. And so that can be kind of discouraging when you spend a lot of time working with the community to develop a plan, and then they can’t execute on it. That’s kind of the curse of development work in general, that it can be very slow. It takes a long time to achieve systems change in communities. These are not easy things to build and develop, and so it can be discouraging, sometimes.

In your work, have you ever encountered a situation where you faced a moral dilemma? And if so, can you describe a situation and how you handled it?

Yeah, I think so. There are a couple of things that come to mind here.

One, working in an academic setting, and even in working in development, I think it’s a fairly secular field. I’m normally the only Christian in the room, and figuring out how to represent myself in a positive way in that environment, that can sometimes be negative towards Christianity, has been a little bit of a navigating path. But being willing to be the one who’s different and not hiding the reasons that you’re out for the Holy Days, or that you can’t work on Sabbath, and just being transparent goes a long way. 

And then the other thing that comes to mind is, I very much feel called to do this type of work. I’ve always wanted to do development work, to be able to help people who are in less fortunate circumstances, and from a lot of people in the Church, I hear things like, “that problem really can’t be solved until the Kingdom comes.” But is that a reason to not help other people?

And for me, this kind of work feels really aligned with my calling, and I think that doesn’t always resonate with other people. Everyone’s not called to do the same thing, but for me it does feel really aligned to be doing this kind of work as a Christian.

You mentioned earlier that your first job was with a different company from where you’re working right now. Was that change intentional? And what did you do to pivot to something different?

My first job I mentioned was working for an engineering firm. I actually really enjoyed the work and my coworkers. But I got the opportunity to pivot into my current role because the professor that I work for now had offered me a role on a National Geographic Expedition team to travel along the Ganges River in India and Bangladesh to study plastic pollution. So, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and opportunity.

I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be. That part of the world is not easy to travel in. There’s a lot of heartbreaking poverty and people who face incredible challenges. It was more difficult than I anticipated, but I am really glad I did it. I think I learned a lot.

That was a couple of years out of college. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have a mortgage. I didn’t have that responsibility, so I gave myself the space to be able to have those adventures with my job when I was younger, and I don’t regret that at all.

What advice would you give someone in high school or junior high about pursuing a career that is personally fulfilling?

The best advice I got when I was looking at colleges and trying to figure out where I should go was that when you’re not completely sure what you want to do, that you should pick the next thing that opens the most doors.

And I really took that to heart. It was one of the reasons that I picked engineering. I mentioned the flexibility that comes with that. I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, especially when you’re 18, 19, going into college, and you’re trying to plan out your whole life. And I think God knows our paths sometimes better than we know them, right? I think we have to put a little bit of trust and faith in that.

And I also think, sometimes just picking the next thing that can get you the next step towards where you want to go, like you don’t have to have the next 25 years of your life planned out. There’s a lot of room to pivot and make changes and adapt if you don’t like something. So, I think picking the next thing that opens a lot of doors is good advice.

Is there any advice you would give someone who wants to do the same kind of work that you do?

What I said earlier about development work being sometimes discouraging is something that holds true in this space. It takes a lot of work to create change in the world. It’s not an easy thing, but it is possible. There are many ways in which people’s lives are different and better now than they were a hundred years ago, and I think God can use our actions for good in the world. 

So, not growing weary in doing good and being willing to realize that this is a long-term process would be my biggest advice to someone who wants to get into this space.  CC