Ciao! My name is Meara Murphy, and I am an aspiring environmental engineer at the University of Pittsburgh! I come from a notoriously snowy city in our country, Buffalo, NY, where I live with my parents and my two sisters. Some of my hobbies include skiing and cooking. At Pitt, I am involved with the Society of Women Engineers, Students for Sustainability, and the Aquaponics Project. The two latter have whetted my appetite for my career as an environmental engineer and have helped me tune in on what I specifically would like to do with my career; that is, I hope to go into either sustainable energy or sustainable agriculture methods. In addition, I know that I want to minor in something that may not pertain directly to the environment but can be extremely helpful in my career. A lover of travel, I am very excited to have been given the opportunity to go to Italy this summer as my first study abroad trip! I know that I want to travel a lot in my career, so this will be an excellent preview of the kind of travelling I hope to do following my graduation.

It may be somewhat confusing to see why this program is directly relevant to my career or my interests. Why is an aspiring environmental engineer going to Italy to study the fashion supply chain? Well, as the second most polluted industry in the world, the fashion industry has certainly captured my interests. I am very excited to explore the different sustainable and socially responsible practices that each company we go to visit integrates into its work and how it impacts many of its important business decisions. Having conducted research on each company’s sustainable values, I am quite intrigued to see how each individual enterprise carries them out. I want to see why the fashion industry is so polluted and all of the efforts being made to fix these issues first hand. Even outside the companies, I am looking forward to learning how Italian culture itself values sustainability beyond the fashion industry.

I am also very excited to be participating in this program because my engineering curriculum does not have much room to take other non-engineering courses that could be very useful in my career. Business classes are not very common in my degree despite the fact that business is extremely important in my career. I am very excited to gain insight into how to run a company, how to interact with customers, how the supply chain works, and how to take each aspect of a business into consideration in order to achieve a desirable level of efficiency. These are not things that I normally hear in classrooms, so it will be interesting to be submerged directly into companies whose businesses revolve around these ideas and to learn first-hand some important skills in business that I may not have been exposed to otherwise. As a student, it is very important to be gaining these insights because it helps me begin to understand precisely what I would like to do with my degree once I graduate.

Lastly, I am very excited to go to Italy to expand my horizons and experience a culture that differs from mine. It will be extremely valuable to gain a global perspective on how a different country handles different issues. As an aspiring engineer, my work should not be tailored towards one culture, and it is vital that I have cultural knowledge to make sure that my work can be accessible and useful to all people. As someone who thoroughly enjoys travelling, I am thrilled to experience Italy through its history, its food (I will be consuming plenty of gelato and pasta this trip), and its people!