Career Day: City of San Diego Water Treatment Plant
For career day this year I went to the Alvarado Water Treatment Plant to shadow the Superintendent Michael Williams. He looks over all three water treatment plants in San Diego which include Alvarado, Miramar, and Otay. One thing that I enjoyed about my experience there was that I got to learn about where my water is coming from that I drink, shower in, and put into my food. I also got to see exactly how it was cleaned and processed which is by adding ferric chloride and polymer which would have positive charges that would force away negatively charged gunk in the water and then stick together because the polymer has such a thick and sticky texture. Something that I disliked was that there was practically no one present and there were altogether 16 employees working at that one giant treatment plant. I feel like it would get lonely and boring and there weren't too many different faces to talk to at the plant, but there were a lot of people at the labs next door where they ran all the test on the water to check for pesticides and metals and all that. Something I learned that I didn't know about before was that at the treatment plant, they are continuously live testing the water's turbidity, pH rating, Chlorine level, etc. One reason for this is because they used to use Chlorine in the water but because the regulations changed they had to switch to using ozone. Going through this experience helped me confirm that this is absolutely not something I would ever want to do. I feel like I need people around me to function and I need to be talking or doing something, not just sitting on a computer all day and watching a screen of percentages and valves and pipes. I feel like in the future I would want to go into the medical field, and zone in a little on psychiatry and looking into peoples' minds because I know that it would provide me with a good amount of money and I also like the idea of knowing how hard I'll have to work in order to accomplish it.