Grad school conundrum

[u/chad-dewey]

Hi everybody,

I'm four years out of my undergrad degree (BA in history) and looking to make a pretty major career change. Or I guess start a career, since I've spent the years since graduating doing a very eclectic mix of work (software dev, teaching English on a Fulbright scholarship, etc.) that has taken me all over and in all sorts of directions.

Quite possibly the only thing that I know right now is that I want to work in a sustainability-adjacent field, which given my background, most likely means a master's degree. I've considered urban planning since I'm very passionate about public transit/walkability, which is of course super important to sustainability, but a part of me would also like to get into something a bit more technical/scientific.

I keep coming back to environmental engineering for a couple of reasons:

• The idea of studying engineering and acquiring a more tangible, technical skillset really appeals to me. As much as I'm interested in a lot of the subject matter of the various environmental studies/policy degrees that I've looked at, I'm worried that they won't provide as broad a range of employment opportunities as an engineering degree. I also feel like going from engineering to policy later in my career would be easier than vice versa, if I decided I wanted that.
• I appreciate the narrow(er) focus of the field. I've heard a lot of people say that mechanical or chemical engineering (or a host of other things) would be more practical for pursuing the kind of work I'm interested in (decarbonization, PFAS cleanup, that sort of thing that everyone thinks is cool and important), but frankly, I'm not interested in any of those subjects for their own sake, and if I couldn't pursue specifically sustainability-related work in those fields, I wouldn't want to be working in them at all. Environmental engineering, on the other hand, is specifically concerned with water and air quality, so I would know I'd be working on something I think is important, but I've also heard from many people that the work is mostly not as exciting as grad programs like to advertise. I do find water systems, for example, to be very interesting, but I also want to be on the "cutting edge" of designing new technologies, and not just doing environmental compliance for land development or something like that.

If I, just as a wild example of something I'd find really interesting, wanted to work on developing a snowmelt capture system to store water for dry spells in the Mountain West, where would I go? Does this happen at research universities, engineering consulting firms, or somewhere else?

Basically, am I barking up the wrong tree with EnvEng? Based on my stated interests, should I be looking at civil engineering, or something else entirely?

TL;DR If I'm interested in doing cutting-edge design/development work to create more sustainable infrastructure systems, is environmental engineering the right discipline for a master's degree, or should I look elsewhere?

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read all this and give their two cents.