Internships
Cupples II for the department of Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
Students interested in environmental engineering can choose from a host of work experience opportunities including summer internships, both in the U.S. and abroad, and cooperative opportunities (co-op). Students can use an internship or co-op experience to blend theory and practice, develop critical work place skills, and earn a salary. Co-op programs are sometimes longer than a summer internship, lasting up to seven or eight months (summer plus a term), whereas internships are usually limited to one term each. Co-op programs are usually more specifically related to your area of interest, while internships are broader and may help you determine what your interests are.
There are plenty of internships or co-op opportunities in engineering. However, with an interest in environmental engineering, there are various non-engineering industries or disciplines that you may want to get experience in. For example, you might want to obtain field sampling experiences, but you don't have to get these experiences in a strictly environmental engineering setting. Field experiences in environmental chemistry or ecology may also train you for similar skills. You may also want to try out internships in policy, project management, or design-related fields. The About page has a more complete list of scopes and applications of environmental engineering.
Carleton's Career Center provides access to several databases for internship searching. Various lists of environmental engineering internships or co-op opportunities are available throughout other universities or colleges' websites. You can find links to some of them below. Note that some of them have a more general list of opportunities for the environment or for engineering, instead of focusing on environmental engineering. Many websites listed under the Job Listings page also provide internship search functions.
Institute for Environmental Science and Technology
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center