Real-life learning: engineering students learn by doing at Cornell AES farm

Each year, students in BEE 4270 learn core engineering skills by conducting research on sites of potential local environmental concern, Steenhuis said. In previous years, they’ve investigated whether Cayuga Lake is warming because of climate change, and improved sampling procedures at a former low-level radioactive waste site. In Fall of 2023, the class designed a groundwater monitoring plan for the Homer C. Thompson Vegetable Research Farm in Freeville, NY. The 260-acre farm, eight miles from Cornell’s Ithaca campus, is managed by Cornell AES and used by researchers growing improved varieties of squash, tomatoes, and rice, among other crops. Thompson farm abuts Fall Creek, which is the source of Cornell's drinking water. The monitoring plan students developed will help farm managers ensure that they continue to protect the nearby water source. The Fall 2024 class will build on those efforts, by doing labs at the farm and working with the Cornell drinking water plant. 

In multiple field trips to the farm, students learned how to drill and install monitoring wells, measure streamflow, and compare several methods for monitoring potential contaminants in groundwater. 

“In mechanical engineering, there’s a right answer, but in the environmental engineering field, you deal with uncertainty,” Steenhuis said. “You can find different solutions to the same problem. You need to make decisions and live with some uncertainty. This course helps students understand that.”

For Gabi Tan ‘24, experiencing the logistics of choosing well locations, drilling boreholes, and comparing the students’ data to data from the U.S. Geological Survey was eye-opening. 

“When I talk about experiences I’ve had related to my field, that lab is probably one of the first places I pull from because that's a lot of what actual scientists and engineers do to test things out in the wild,” Tan said. “Especially for your first few years at Cornell, you’re put through all these intense science and math courses, and everything does feel a little theoretical because you’re working with these numbers and scenarios you’ve never seen before. But getting to be at an actual farm and seeing how everything fits together was very beneficial.”

Mateo Aranzazu ‘24 is interested in wastewater treatment and drinking water safety, so he especially appreciated learning about chemical transport, and the ways that different contaminants can move through soil and groundwater. He also appreciated that the project for the course was based in a real-life situation, and the findings students created benefited a working farm. 

“Things that I’ve learned in previous classes, I used in this class and suddenly saw how everything relates together,” he said. “It was very nice to know that all these things I’ve read about, I’ve now done them with my own two hands.”