"I was an undergrad at Rice, and everyone in my class was either going to med school or getting a doctoral degree in chemistry and heading toward academia," said Rice University alumna Katlyn Schmeltzer, MCEE '25. "I knew I didn't want to do either of those, but I had taken a lot of civil engineering classes and was really interested in the intersection between environmental engineering and chemistry."
Schmeltzer earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Rice, drawn to the overlap between her field and environmental engineering, particularly groundwater geochemistry and remediation. As she considered her next step, she realized that earning a Professional Engineering license would be important.
That realization prompted a pivot from her natural sciences background to the industry-focused Master of Civil and Environmental Engineering (MCEE) program, a graduate degree that would provide the engineering tools she wanted and a pathway to become licensed. “It gave me technical skills and exposure to engineering specifically. It filled in the gaps in my understanding of the engineering knowledge I needed to be valuable in the field,” Schmeltzer said.
During the program, one course stood out for how directly it connected to industry. Energy and the Environment, taught by Daniel Cohan, paired students with a company mentor to work on a real project, and representatives from multiple firms came through the class. "It's a really good career booster because you get that company engagement," she said. Other faculty left their mark in different ways. Pedro Alvarez's course on bioremediation and wastewater treatment introduced concepts she now uses constantly, while her capstone advisor, James Doss-Gollin, deepened her grounding in hydrology and connected her to a professional network in the field.
The program's small size made relationships with professors and fellow graduate students more valuable, and Schmeltzer built those connections intentionally. She also drew on Rice's Center for Career Development and the Activate Engineering Communication Program’s one-on-one coaching, which she points to as essential for students who did not come from a Rice undergraduate background.
That foundation carried directly into her first job. Schmeltzer is now an environmental engineer at GSI Environmental in Houston, a role that grew out of an internship she landed between her undergraduate and graduate years. Her work covers environmental litigation support, government-funded research, and field site remediation, taking her from filing permits and reports to sampling groundwater and soil in the field to running experiments in the lab. She recently drove from Laredo, Texas toward the Canadian border, sampling for PFAS to map background concentrations across the country. The connections between GSI and Rice's civil and environmental department run deep, with faculty and former students working alongside her. “The number of connections Rice professors have in Houston is really helpful,” said Schmeltzer.
The link between the MCEE coursework and her daily work is concrete. To prove that one of her field sites is undergoing monitored natural attenuation, Schmeltzer draws on foundations from Alvarez's class and on the fate-and-transport principles central to another course. The connections surface constantly, from engineering economics formulas she pulled for a litigation case to risk exposure metrics from another class. “It's really interesting how often engineering principles from the program come up,” Schmeltzer said.
Having interned at GSI before finishing the program gave her a clear sense of what mattered. "The MCEE prepares you well on its own. You work hard and study hard, and it prepares you for the work really well," she said.
For anyone weighing the MCEE, Schmeltzer advises starting with the destination. “Look at job openings you find interesting, the ones you want to do for your life, and then see if the MCEE is a good addition to your undergrad in getting you there. For me, it definitely was. My undergrad was in chemistry, and getting the MCEE opened the door to engineering.”