Julia Saintz, MSUS ’19, is creating a more sustainable company
“I have many dream jobs,” laughs Julia Saintz, MSUS ’19, “but this is one of them.”
Saintz works for a company called Evoqua as the resident sustainability expert. “I’m building our sustainability program,” she explains, adding that her position is brand new.
Evoqua—a company of around 4,000 employees across about 170 locations— sells “equipment, services, and solutions that deal with many issues pertaining to water,” says Saintz. She adds that a lot of employees choose Evoqua because of the importance of the work that they do. “We literally clean water. It’s something you can really be proud of.”
Saintz came to the Master of Sustainability program at the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment following stints as an environmental educator in Nevada and as a community outreach coordinator for the Alice Ferguson Foundation in the DC area, helping to run a trash-free Potomac watershed initiative. The Falk School program appealed to her because she was looking for a sustainability graduate program that incorporated urban planning and community resiliency. What she found at The Falk School directly led to her success in her current position.
“I had the sustainable decision analysis class which was fantastic because it helped me figure out how to prioritize different sustainability initiatives,” she says. “How do you make the best decision for your organization? You get a lot of things thrown at you in sustainability, and the class is about how to choose between them.”
“My systems thinking class was amazing at getting us to think about how everything is connected—how you map it out, and how you work toward addressing it. For example, is there one kingpin or node, where if you change it, you can affect the rest of the system either positively or negatively? My time at Chatham really helped me understand how to work toward changes systematically.”
“The faculty are fantastic and really holistic in their thinking about sustainability, social, environmental, and economic realms,” she adds.
Saintz also credits outside-the-classroom activities with adding to her experience. “I worked on the K-12 environmental education program. That just fed my soul. Now I’m on the advisory board of the program, so it’s great to stay connected and to help it grow.” She was also the assistant project manager for the development of the Eden Hall Campus Strategic Plan, where her tasks included running and managing meetings and making sure that all stakeholders had a voice in the process.
“The faculty, the staff, everybody – it’s a wonderful community. I feel like I'm coming home when I come to Eden Hall,” Saintz says.
In her role at Evoqua, Saintz meets with “folks in operations, to figure out what we’re doing right now, and how we can be more sustainable in the future.” She also meets with external stakeholders, such as Allegheny Clean Ways to discuss volunteer opportunities for employees, “which is more on the corporate social responsibility side,” she says. “That’s part of my job, too.” Then she’ll also meet with HR to “discuss how we can work to better our inclusion and diversity initiatives. The job is really dealing with all aspects of sustainability. I love that, because it’s holistic.”
Saintz is relatively new at Evoqua, having been hired full-time since August, so much of her work is assessing the current state of operations. But once more sustainability initiatives have
been put into place, there too, her education at the Falk School will come in handy when it comes to getting people to comply
“I hadn’t even heard of behavior change or behavior modification until I took Dr. Deborah DeLong’s Behavioral Change for Sustainability class, and I was just blown away,” she says. “I did my Master’s thesis on behavior change for food waste sorting. How do you get the person to throw the banana peel in the correct bin? Is it the bin size, the color, the signs, the placement? I love behavior change and the science behind it. It’s super fascinating and it comes up all the time.”
Saintz was also awarded a Schweitzer Fellowship, during which she served as an environmental fellow, working with senior citizens to get their views on environmental challenges. “I wanted to show that senior citizens have a lot of interesting views, and that we should give value to them. Peter (Peter Walker, Ph.D., dean of the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment) always says that if we’re doing this for the environment, we should stop, because if we just leave the environment alone, it’ll fix itself. But we’re doing sustainability to help people.”