Water Education, Management and Research

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

The Water and Environmental Center at Walla Walla Community College is a collaborative effort dedicated to water education, management, and research. Walla Walla Community College is now offering three different degree programs in their Water Technology and Management Program; an Irrigation Technology Degree, a Watershed Ecology Degree, and a Water Resources Technology Degree. Melissa Holecek, WWCC advisor in the program talks about some of the career opportunities for students upon graduating.

HOLECEK: Career opportunities in the Watershed Ecology Program could be working for the Forest Service, the Corps of Engineers, for a non-profit, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife; those would all be potential watershed ecology employers. We also have some students who work for private industries. There's really good job opportunities whether you're a computer person and you want to do GIS mapping and help conserve natural resources through that way, or if you want to do lab work or if you want to do traditional field work. Water Resources Technology predictable employers are conservation districts; they could work with landowners who have agriculture on their property - looking at balancing the ag interests as well as the conservation of putting in buffer strips along your stream, helping them with irrigation efficiency projects. And then with the Irrigation Technology a lot of those students are working for irrigation companies, they're in sales, they're in design; they could go back to a family farm and do troubleshooting or installation.

Some of the partners of the Water and Environmental Center include Walla Walla Watershed Management Partnership, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the state Department of Ecology, the Sustainable Living Center and Walla Walla Community College.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.