Jinjie Liao

10/2/2019

The Water Person:

He Loves The Environment

John Ruskin, a prominent social thinker of the Victorian era, was said, “Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty” (Ruskin). The beauty of Earth should be taken care of like a painting. Many people are working together to fix the ancient painting passed from billion years ago. Omar M. Hammad, is a master’s degree in civil engineering with the environmental concentration, is an environmental engineer professor at The City College of New York (CCNY). I met Professor Hammad in my Earth System Science and Engineering lab. He is my laboratory professor for the Fall 2019 semester. When he introduced himself during the first class, he said, “I was working in a hotel as hotel management for thirteen years.” This bit of information caught my attention. I asked him why he became an environmental engineer.  

The turning point in his career was two weeks in which the hotel he was working on had a power outage. They started to look at various things to avoid losing power again. He got more and more interested during the researching about climate change, solar panels and other things that might be important for a hotel. So he went back to school and got a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering major at CCNY in 2016. He is focused on water pollution such as drinking water and wastewater. 

Currently, he is working at the EPA, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, as a SIP, a state implementation plan specialist. He and the team are developing ozone pollution standards and generally identifying solutions if any National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) have a nonattainment area. The air monitor at CCNY’s administration building is constantly taking air and calculating the pollution in the air. He is also working with the State to submit the plans for air pollution. He has worked with the entire state of New Jersey for the state’s implementation plan and the federal register to pass the regulation. It takes him anywhere from two weeks to two months to write a draft of the rules and three to six months to complete the whole regulation with a  lawyer. Making regulations is very long and boring, but he must do it. 

He has worked with both small and big groups, like a Wood-smoke or the group has covered the regions of New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. In small groups, people will most likely call him or have a face to face meeting. But in a large region, it is better to contact them by email and cell phone. The rule is, if they contact you by email, then you just respond to them by email; if they called you, then you call back. It is better to ask first if they can answer a phone call or not. Also reply to an email is not like a chat or a one-sentence response. It should include the purpose, specific responses with the general solution, and the stander form of an email. The biggest challenge for him in this career is that he must keep learning things because everything is changing very fast. To keep up, he suggests that we must be learning and researching to be professional.

Professor Hammad said the New York Water Environment Association (NYWEA) is one of the great groups that have a student chapter, and he references that the City College of New York has its student club under the NYWEA. The student club will use its funds to pay the membership fees and conference fees for students. A three-day conference is held every year in February in New York. All the water people will be coming and some students will make posters to present. Others, such as the online magazine of the NYWEA Clearwater’s magazine is Professor Hammad’s favorite reading on the train. The NYWEA app has all the magazines about the water environment for the members. If you are a member of the NYWEA, they will also send the magazines to your house. The Air & Waste Management Association (AWMA) also have their Environmental Managers (EM) magazine for anyone to read. 

I understand why Professor Hammad chose to be an environmental engineer, even though he had to quit his job to go back to school and start from zero to learn to be an environmental engineer. It is unbelievable what is happening to the environment right now. He saw that and wanted to make a difference. Even though each of us is powerless, but a thousand, a million, a billion of us can make the environment great again. After my conversation with Professor Hammad I have realized that to reach my goal, I had to take advantage of the resources available at the school. I went to join the student club of NYWEA and went to visit one of the wastewater labs on the first floor of the Steinman hall. I also talked to Professor Diyamandoglu, a civil engineer professor at CCNY, who wants to create a new student chapter of the American Water Works Association. Professor Hammad’s favorite quote is, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool” by Richard P. Feynman. That is true because the brain always tricks itself into thinking that it mastered something, but later, we find out we have never mastered and we need more practice. The most important thing for me is to work hard in my classes and not fool myself. If Professor Hammad can start from zero and succeed in this field then so can I.

Reference

Ruskin, J. (2019). John Ruskin Quotes Quotable Quote. Retrieved from 

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/176797-nature-is-painting-for-us-day-after-day-

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