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Thomas Helps Launch Environmental Engineering Major
12/12/2015 9:00:00 AM | Women's Soccer
By Ryan Neu, Duke Sports Information
DURHAM, N.C. – Duke women's soccer defender Sammie Thomas will be one of approximately 350 students in the Pratt School of Engineering's graduating Class of 2016. However, she will be one of just two students to receive a degree in environmental engineering.
The environmental engineering program was announced during the spring semester of 2013 and this May will mark its inaugural graduating class.
“It's amazing just because we've kind of whittled down,” Thomas said. “At first there were four of us and now there's only two. We're kind of just whittling down and we're so close — the ones that have been through the program — because we're figuring it out as we go along and the teachers are working with us and we're all still trying to make it work and grow the program with the younger classes as well.”
Thomas has had to overcome several obstacles both on the field and in the classroom in order to reach this accomplishment.
She first came to Duke in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, but persevered throughout her freshman and sophomore years before transferring into Pratt at the end of the fall semester her sophomore year.
Because she had obligations with the soccer team, Thomas not only took courses within Trinity College, but also classes in Pratt for which she had not taken the prerequisites, forcing her to learn the earlier material and apply it as she was learning more advanced engineering lessons.
At the same time, Thomas recovered and rehabilitated an ankle injury that required two separate surgeries — one surgery on each ankle — to fix. Balancing her rehab and then soccer once she healed with the demanding course load that an engineering degree requires was extremely difficult, but Thomas remained focused on her goal.
“Time management was definitely difficult,” Thomas said. “But I got into the routine of just giving myself one night a week where I can just let my brain recover and so I'd just give myself Friday night to relax, hang out with the team or do whatever but no schoolwork and that definitely helped me stay focused when I needed to be focused on school.”
Since she started pursing her environmental engineering degree, Thomas has gone to work on applying her knowledge and skills to the real world.
“We've done a lot of different projects,” Thomas said. “Most of the courses try to incorporate different types of design elements. One project was getting into design and so I made a miniature foosball table and another project I made a litter trap for Ellerbe Creek and then this past summer I was out in Los Angeles doing remediation engineering and working with the design teams that were helping clean up different types of chemical spills and things like that.”
The Ellerbe Creek litter trap was funded after Thomas and the rest of her project team applied for and won grant money from the 2015 SECU Emerging Issues Prize for Innovation.
Thomas acknowledged, though, that she would not have been able to achieve all that she has in the last four years without the help and support of her teammates. Through the injury, the late nights studying and the demand of being a Division I student-athlete and engineering student at one of the best universities in the country, Thomas's teammates have kept her going.
“Their support definitely meant the world to me,” Thomas said. “Being a part of this team is like gaining 26 new sisters all at once and they're always there to support you and have your back. I remember one practice I came and I had two nights in a row where I'd only gotten two hours of sleep and I was struggling and everyone was coming up to me saying, 'You got this, you can do it, we believe in you, we're right here.' Every play they were just cheering for me to make it through and it's just been an amazing experience.”
Thomas recently completed and passed her Fundamentals of Engineering exam, one of the first steps toward becoming a professionally licensed engineer.
After graduation, Thomas hopes to enter the consulting world, specifically in hazardous waste remediation and eventually wants to return to school to work on a masters. But Thomas learned a lot from her experience playing soccer at Duke, particularly from her injury sophomore year.
“The injury definitely reminds me that you're not just defined by what you do,” Thomas said. “You're defined by who you are and what you love to do is only a part of who you are and if you lose it, it's not the end of the world. You can always get it back and it's not something that can be taken away from you forever.”
In the end, who she is, not what she does, is what is most important to her. And she has proven time and again that she has the character and talent to succeed once she leaves in May as one of Duke's first environmental engineers.
#GoDuke
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