Is the environmental field dying?

Hi Alicia,

I apologize in advance that this answer is not going to be super straightforward.  I have a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from a school where the Civil & Environmental engineering departments were one in the same.  My school's program focused pretty heavily on water, including stormwater, drinking water treatment, pipe calculations etc.  In my experience and in my geographic area (New York City area), the water engineering field is doing extremely well.  Every company I can think of where I know somebody is looking to hire.  There are green infrastructure initiatives being put out by major cities in the area as well as flood resiliency projects in response to Hurricane Sandy's devastation to the area in 2012.  Most people in the water/wastewater field studied environmental engineering or civil engineering.  I would say it's about 50/50.  On the environmental side of things (insurance, remediation, etc.), I have personally seen this phasing out.  Where we once had people from environmental firms or environmental divisions within our company do things like permitting, I'm definitely seeing a move toward doing those things on our own.

So the answer to your question is not that straightforward!  It depends what area within the field you're trying to go into, and I'm sure you will also see some variations based on location.  For example, water engineers are really busy figuring out how to deal with water from future floods in the NYC area, but water engineers in a landlocked state like Kansas maybe aren't as busy and are working on completely different types of projects (just a guess).

Stacy