From film studies to electrical engineering: Amethyst O’Connell

I started college in 2015 as a Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) student at Saint Paul College, with the intent of transferring in 2016 to a program in film studies. I cared a lot about climate change, and I wanted to make a better climate change documentary than Al Gore. My first PSEO year in community college, I learned a lot about myself and about climate change. More importantly, I learned that the type of change I wanted to make in the world would be incredibly difficult to make with a degree in film studies.

I changed from aspiring for film studies to aspiring for electrical engineering in part from observing the activism work of my upper classmates in trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline project from progressing. The pipeline made it clear to me that the only force strong enough to truly make a difference in the climate crisis (and where I could see my own impacts as an individual) was through the engineers who had the power to warm our planet in the first place. 

Instead of leaving in 2016, I spent two more years at Saint Paul College, where I was elected student senate treasurer and later president. I then transferred to the University of Minnesota where I spent five of the most challenging years of my life completing an electrical engineering degree. Time is a valuable resource in the fight against climate change, and time effectiveness in college is a function of passion, talent, work, and privilege. For me, much of the program felt like writing with my non-dominant hand.

O'Connell and fellow engineering student, Locke Rowland, at a community event. 

The job I have now is incredibly cool, and one that I would not have been able to get without my electrical engineering degree. I work as an Electrical Designer at Michaud Cooley Erickson, an mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) consulting firm. The firm is typically hired by an architecture firm or others to create blueprints and plans for specialized building systems outside of the scope of an architect. Basically, I draw building electrical systems. It’s especially neat that with a stroke of a digital pen, finances, and client needs permitting, I can basically be the catalyst for putting solar on a building. 

That is not the case at every job, and that’s not even the case at every MEP firm. Ours has the environment at the forefront of our core values. This is a great find for a person like me who has sketches of carbon-negative mixed-use residential buildings powered by piezoelectric staircases, solar panels, gym weights, and wind turbine doodles in the margins of my electrical engineering notebooks.