Looking back on my RORG experience: Summer 2023 Stormwater Interns

by Stormwater Interns Madelyn Craft, Gary Liu, and Chantal Korde

RORG Director Eliana Brown asked the Stormwater Interns each to write a blog summarizing their time with us: what they worked on, what they learned, and what’s next for them. Read about their experiences below!

Madelyn Craft

It’s strange to think that another season of my life with RORG is coming to an end. I have spent the last two years working with this amazing garden and its amazing team, and it is one of the best choices I have ever made. This summer, I was given the awesome opportunity to do closer work with the garden: to be a stormwater intern with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. Through this program, I worked closely with the RORG and NLRS (Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy) teams.

My first project as a summer intern was to help to collect data from hundreds of Illinois MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) reports that inform the urban stormwater sector of the NLRS Biennial Report. The larger report discusses strategies that statewide organizations are taking to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus making their way into Illinois watersheds. These nutrients eventually make their way to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico where they cause a massive hypoxic zone, which has deadly effects on the environment there. With a vast amount of land in Illinois being either urban or agricultural, reducing the amount of nutrient runoff is vital to saving aquatic life and keeping healthy soil in place.

It was super interesting to read these reports to see what different Illinois municipalities are doing to mitigate nutrient runoff. These strategies include physically substantial things such as erosion control or street sweeping. However, it also includes things like outreach, which is so important to teach residents, young and old, about the importance of environmental concerns. In some cases, that outreach includes elements of fun.

After working on MS4s and NLRS matters, I was able to focus more on RORG-related topics:

1. Exploring future signage options. I worked with other interns to explore signage options for the rain garden, which it currently needs. It will be great to add signage explaining green infrastructure and the details of our rain garden design to visitors. Though nothing is set in stone with the signs yet, we made some great progress as to what they will be in the future.
2. Developing a student docent program. I worked with RORG Student Engagement Coordinator, Erin Schimenti, to explore options and ideas for our upcoming docent program. A docent program for the garden will set a streamlined path for people to be able to give tours of RORG. This usually includes some sort of training and the like, and that is what we worked on together.
3. Preparing to lead future tours of the garden. Related to the development of the docent program, Erin and I have been working on a tour script for the garden. We will be presenting our first RORG tour to fellow Sustainable Design students this month. We have put a lot of time into editing and practicing a tour script and are very excited to give it. We hope that we inspire students to research more about green infrastructure and possibly get them involved with the rain garden as well. When I took the tour as a sophomore in the Sustainable Design program, that is exactly what I did. I was a little lost in what I wanted to pursue as a career, but I am forever grateful for that tour and the steps I took afterward to become a part of RORG, first as a volunteer, then intern, and now a part of their team as Volunteer Coordinator. Now I am much closer to knowing what I want to do post-graduation because of this experience. I plan to continue working in the realm of green infrastructure, making urban landscapes healthy and sustainable.

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Chengxu (Gary) Liu

Time has passed by so quickly, but this summer, I have learned a lot. This has been one of my most valuable summers at the University of Illinois!

I found this summer internship through the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) campus engagement coordinator Angela Archer last September at the ACES virtual career fair. Through my conversation with Angela, I learned about Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and its mission. As I’m very interested in environmental management, especially soil and water treatment, I decided to gain more experience and skills in these areas. Therefore, I realized that Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant was a perfect choice for my summer internship.

When the internship began, I met with Eliana, Layne, Angela, and all the other IISG interns and supervisors. Nearly every week, we met to discuss different topics, including job searching, writing an elevation pitch, and communicating science. Through these meetings, I gained a deeper understanding of career development to be ready for my future career.

For the first half of the summer, I assisted with data gathering from annual stormwater reports (MS4s). I started earlier than my colleagues to help rename files to streamline the search process, which proved helpful as the summer progressed. Every day, we interns were assigned to different counties to read and seek data that informs an analysis for the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS) Biennial Report. It felt like important work to ensure that NLRS partners know what is being done by stormwater professionals to ensure human well-being and ecosystem integrity. The NLRS has been a scientific interest of mine for a long time, and I am excited that this professional internship experience has provided deeper insight into the topic.

For the second half, I performed literature searches on soil infiltration and compaction under drought conditions as well as responses of native plants to drought. Since June 2023, drought has occurred extensively throughout Illinois and Midwest, negatively impacting some plants at the Red Oak Rain Garden and other places. Therefore, I sought information about how drought affected soil properties and plant growth as well as the potential solutions. I have been doing soil research since my junior year, and I was excited to assist in this interest area. I found useful information that can be potentially utilized for further research and future testing. In this way, the research I have been doing for the second half of my internship will have a lasting impact.

Research has been a large portion of my undergraduate study, and this internship has taught me how to combine literature reviews and synthesize information for further analysis. In the future, I plan to attend graduate school to research soil and water management. I am thankful this summer internship provided me such a unique opportunity to become more familiar with this topic.

Finally, this summer internship has developed my communication and time management skills. I asked questions on anything I did not understand clearly so that there were no misconceptions between me, my colleagues, and my supervisors. In addition, I created a schedule that assisted me with tasks I needed to do every day so that I could complete them in a timely and orderly way. This internship really trained me on how to be more independent, communicative, and effective.

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Chantal Korde

Looking back on this summer, working with the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) has brought me so many fun memories. I have had the chance to meet so many wonderful people and work in what I am passionate about, while also making a positive impact on the environment. After all these fantastic experiences, it is hard to believe that this summer is ending.

Previously, I was able to work in a chemical engineering research lab with Professor Sing, as well as in a classroom as a chemistry teaching assistant. As a chemical engineer with a minor in natural resources and environmental science, these both gave me extremely valuable experiences with the chemistry and engineering side of my interests, helping me learn important leadership, scientific reporting, and teaching skills. However, my ultimate career goals lie in working to combat climate change, so in the spring of my sophomore year I decided to broaden my horizons a bit and started looking for a role that would fulfill some of my environmental interests.

When I found IISG at the career fair, I was immediately interested. It was a perfect blend of green infrastructure and data work with an environmental focus. I thought that it would be a great fit for me because I already had data analytics skills from my work in research, but it would also be a fantastic introduction to my environmental career interests. Through this program at the career fair, I also found out about the Red Oak Rain Garden, and I was able to visit this beautiful piece of green infrastructure and start to understand how exactly green infrastructure works and how it can be implemented. Not only did this make me more eager to apply for the position, but it also made me more fully aware of all the sustainability efforts on the UIUC campus.

While working with IISG, I was able to dive deeper into the Red Oak Rain Garden and green infrastructure. I worked on the stormwater management team with RORG’s Director Eliana Brown and Assistant Director Layne Knoche. They are both fantastic mentors and are very proud of the rain garden and what it stands for. At the beginning of the summer, I was working on Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) reports, and I was able to gain so much insight into how stormwater is dealt with in Illinois, and the impact it can have if not managed properly. The ultimate goal of that project is to eliminate the hypoxic ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico caused by nutrient pollution coming from the Mississippi River. As one of the states in the Mississippi River watershed, Illinois has created programs, like this one, to try to work towards preventing pollution in its rivers. This role has made me much more aware of what I can do personally, whether it be making sure leaves don’t stay on the road in fall, or getting a rain barrel to prevent some amount of polluted stormwater from entering streams and rivers.

The second half of the summer was dedicated to research on green infrastructure barriers, and how to overcome them. This topic interested me greatly and allowed me to explore one of my passions. My goal for my career is to eventually work in implementing green infrastructure, so it was extremely valuable to see what sorts of things I may eventually have to overcome to implement it well. It also changed the way I look at the Red Oak Rain Garden, knowing what things may have stood in its way, making it all the more impressive that the team behind it managed to pull it off so successfully. Not only did I realize all of this, but I also gained scientific interpretation and communication skills from interpreting scientific papers and presenting the material in a way that was accessible.

In July, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the Red Oak Rain Garden and work with some of the volunteers to help upkeep the garden. Later that day, I also went around campus looking for examples of green infrastructure to photograph. This really made me realize how much green infrastructure blends into the landscape around it while looking beautiful and making a positive environmental impact. I learned a lot about how green infrastructure can be incorporated into urban landscapes without needing a lot of land, particularly projects like green roofs and permeable pavement.

Seeing the green infrastructure installations and researching what barriers stand in their way not only gave me a better appreciation of the work that goes into putting them up, but it also gave me valuable skills in understanding what sites would be good candidates for green infrastructure, and the communication and interdisciplinary work that needs to go into them to make them possible. This knowledge will be very valuable as I move into future positions, where I hope to be the one spearheading efforts to make green infrastructure more widespread and utilized.

The Stormwater Internships were made possible by funding from Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. We’re grateful for their support.