In Their Words: Meet Green Campus Intern Bogdan Rusu

This series highlights the most important people involved with the Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Campus Program—our interns! The program currently employs more than 75 university and college students across California who implement energy efficiency projects at their campuses. See the entire In Their Words series.

In Bogdan's Words

• Name: Bogdan Rusu
• Campus: University of California, Irvine
• Studying: Chemical Engineering

I chose to study engineering with a specific idea in mind: to engage in something truly meaningful. I took a step back, and looked at the world. What is most important today? How can I have the strongest positive impact in my time? It is obvious that our biggest challenge today is to globally sustain ourselves. The world's population is growing extremely fast, thus we have to meet demands with fewer resources than we started with. This is the idea that had the most weight in my decision to become a chemical engineering major.

Moving to the United States from Romania about three years ago really opened my eyes in how much the world as a whole is demonstrating wasteful behavior. I grew up not thinking too much about sustainability. Romania, and especially my home town there, cannot be considered overcrowded or overpopulated. I have never seen a landfill, and never truly wondered where our trash goes. Romania has a population of 22 million, and Los Angeles alone has around 10 million inhabitants. The minute I arrived at the LAX Airport, I found it difficult to breathe. I soon learned that the smog was a severe issue. As I drove away from the airport, I wondered how much food or even fuel is necessary to sustain such a large population; where does it all come from? Eventually I wondered how much trash is generated from a city like Los Angeles, and where does it all end up. The answer to that thought was not calming.

Notions like efficiency, education and outreach came along. I attended one of the career fairs in my first year of college. Green Campus had a job opening, and it resonated well with my objectives. The people were great, and their mission worthwhile. I have to say that I learned a ton as a Green Campus intern. I think of it as a fun class, where you get closer to your colleagues to the point that you can call them friends. I learn without even realizing how much I learn.

Before being an intern, I didn't quite realize how much of an impact we have on our physical surroundings. We do not usually think about where our everyday trash ends up. In our perspective, it disappears. We do not usually think about our energy usage. From our point of view, we just turn something on and it works. Now, I ask myself, where does the trash that I see end up? If I notice a piece of trash on the ground, I think that if it rains, it ends up in the sewer, and then in the ocean. A very minute amount of trash actually makes it to the recycling centers. I imagine where the energy that keeps my laptop working at this moment comes from: burning coal, with 35% efficiency, as the remaining two-thirds is lost as waste heat.

Green Campus literally changed the way I look at the world. It makes me think about the responsibility that we should all, as members of the global population, identify with.