Student Spotlight
Lauren Bolotin
Nevada Water Resources Association would like to spotlight Student of the Month, Lauren Bolotin. She has attended school in Reno her whole life and is in her final year of completing her B.S. in Ecohydrology and B.S. in Environmental Science. She has worked at Washoe County since August of 2018 and has been able to gain experience with water quality, groundwater, reclaim water, and storm water and has had many other great opportunities involving County projects.
She is a brand-new student member of NWRA and first heard of NWRA at a mixer event put on by the Hydro program at UNR which had many NWRA members there. Many of the members were encouraging participation in the Student Poster Competition and applying for the available scholarships. When she became involved with a County project involving reclaim irrigation water, she decided to enter the poster competition and to attend the conference as a student member.
She is genuinely interested in learning about all the different aspects of the water resources industry, including the careers people have in the field as well as the knowledge they have to offer and views they have to share. She feels that NWRA will help her meet a variety of people in the field of hydrology that she can learn from and network to make connections and learn more about what opportunities there are for her as well as show her new areas of research that may fascinate her.
As a brand-new student member of NWRA, she hasn't fully experienced everything that NWRA has to offer but is very excited to find out what opportunities she will find in this organization. Having attended other conferences before and gaining invaluable insights and connections, she thinks any professional organization that holds conferences offers an incredible opportunity in that aspect. When she attends her first NWRA conference in January, she can already tell that she will get to meet and talk with many great people that she will learn a lot from and by participating in the Student Poster Competition, regardless of the outcome she will have gained experience with her first ever poster presentation, which will be useful to her in the future.
She personally loves to take advantage of networking opportunities, whether it is in the hopes of meeting people who are part of a certain organization or company she wants to work for or people who have overarching careers, responsibilities, or research projects that she is interested in and want to learn about. She thinks that different networking opportunities are some of the best ways the Board of Directors can help students with career goals. She thinks another beneficial idea would be to hold events with many professionals and students or to pair people up individually with people who can help them with things like tailoring resumes for the jobs they want to apply for or for graduate school. She would also be interested in a list of jobs, internship, or volunteer opportunities that different NWRA members have that they would like students in NWRA to know about so that they can gain experience within the NWRA community.
Header photo by LEO DROZDOFF
