Aspiring Trinity Engineer Protects the Water Beneath Us

As a child in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, Sofia Ko ’29 reached for her walking shoes and rushed her mom out the door for her favorite part of the day: a nature hike. Everything in the outside world beckoned and teemed with energy.

As a teen, Ko felt that energy sapping away as she learned about climate change. “I felt lonely, like the only person in my world who still cared about the environment,” she says. “It was like I had to carry the weight of this on my shoulders.” 

While Ko found solidarity in initiatives like the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate organization, “burnout” still hit in the form of trying to balance studies, sports, and clubs with activism, and Ko decided to spend more time focusing on the transition to college.

As a Trinity student, Ko’s spark is back. Thriving in a summer internship with the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance (GEAA), she’s honing valuable professional tools as part of a team focused on water policy research and advocacy.

“More than two million Texans rely on this aquifer,” says Ko, an aspiring engineer. “I chose this internship because GEAA’s mission is high-impact, and it aligns with my passion to conserve and advocate for the environment.”

The Edwards Aquifer spans more than 8,000 square miles under eight Central Texas counties, including Bexar, where San Antonio lies. It is one of the major sources of water for the area. 

At Trinity, Ko quickly met friends with like-minded passions in both engineering and environmental issues. In her First-Year Experience Course, “Climate Changed,” she turned the head of David Ribble ’82, dean of the D. R. Semmes School of Science, who ended up writing her letter of recommendation for the GEAA internship. “His support is so meaningful because he’s so busy, but he still takes the time to advocate for students,” says Ko, who completed a literature review paper on microalgae bioremediation of wastewater as a final piece of work for Ribble’s class. 

The internship is part of Trinity’s Arts, Letters, and Enterprise program, which connects Tigers with professional, hands-on opportunities in the nonprofit sector. As an intern, Sofia’s typical day runs for about eight hours of research for long-term projects on Texas water designations, or other specialized topics. 

Ko preps water monitoring kits for citizen volunteers, attends meetings, and learns more about the technical side of water advocacy. After just one year at Trinity, Ko says she’s better suited for this variety of work.

“Trinity is just very interdisciplinary, and I love that because being in engineering science, that doesn’t mean I can’t also be passionate about sustainability,” she says. “It's just great to be able to branch out of my fields to explore passions elsewhere.”

The best skill Ko is learning at GEAA is how to keep a passion alive.

“Our GEAA team is so optimistic, and they're very high energy, but they also know when to dial it down,” Ko says. “You need to have a healthy balance of productive, focused time for work as well as time for fun and connection. I see people here who’ve been doing this for 20+ years still being so spunky, so energetic, and that’s just inspiring.”

With the GEAA team as inspiration, Ko says she is committed to balancing engineering studies with environmental advocacy work in her three years left at Trinity. She hopes to prevent burnout by pacing herself and making sure she preserves energy for the future.

This internship, she says, is “definitely steering me towards specializing in the water industry and continuing with groundwater conservation and advocacy in the future.”

As Ko thinks about the next kid who’ll want to hike along the river, visit a lake, or drink clean water after a hot day outside, she urges readers to learn more about the Edwards Aquifer that nourishes us all.

“The Earth is big. But it’s not so big that all the things we do don’t have an impact,” she says. “Be mindful of the little things that affect our groundwater, from picking up after your pet or preventing oil leaks from your car, to the big things, like limiting runoff from development.”