Title: Matthew Snyder ‘19, ‘20

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[00:00:05,300] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to engineering career conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 

[00:00:12,555] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications program at Cornell. We're excited to bring you this forum where we host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. 

[00:00:28,190] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Today, we're joined by Matthew Snyder. I met Matthew when he was an undergraduate here studying civil and environmental engineering. He was nominated by a supervisor for co-op student of the year for his exceptional work and receive that award in 2018. He then stayed on for his masters in civil and environmental engineering. And he's now an assistant project manager and engineer working with water purification and resource recovery. Welcome, Matthew. 

[00:00:57,785] MATTHEW SNYDER: Good to be here. 

[00:01:00,020] CHRISTA DOWNEY: How are you today? 

[00:01:01,460] MATTHEW SNYDER: I'm good. It's a little gloomy down here in Texas, but we always need the rain. 

[00:01:05,960] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Yeah, Good. Good. I'm glad you have that. Speaking of rain, so you work in water purification. Can you tell us more about your work and what that entails? 

[00:01:15,515] MATTHEW SNYDER: It's a fancy way of saying drinking water. Basically, I do mostly "inside the fence", as they call it. So once we get the water to treat and then we send it out past that, I do a little bit of that, but mostly actually inside the fence of the water treatment. So it's everything from getting the water from its source to cleaning it up. Different ways to do that. While I was at Cornell, I actually was able to work a little bit with Agua Clara. So I did some gravity-based filtration and whatnot that they were working with. But also with my masters, I worked with the Ithaca water treatment plant, which they have membranes. And membranes have been something of a fascination to me. I kind of, as I tell people, I fell in love with them in school. So I do mostly, I specialize mostly, at my company, in membrane filtration. Whether that be what we call direct filtration- so, just water from the source through the membranes, to the distribution network-or indirect, where we treat it a little bit upfront. 

[00:02:15,845] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So can you tell us more about what's the day to day? What, "inside the fence"? Are you walking around the plant throughout the day? Are you in communication with a lot of people? Are you behind a computer all day? Are you working remotely? What does that look like? 


[00:02:30,335] MATTHEW SNYDER: Yes. So my company were fairly medium-sized. We have about 1100-1200 employees, so not super, super large like some the huge firms. But we specialize in client service. That's what we pride ourselves in. So we're still small enough that you can pick up the phone and call us and we can be there and a couple of hours. We have offices all over the southeast United States. So Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. Just opened one in Arkansas. So we're kind of finding our roots, but because we're still medium-sized and we pride ourselves on that client service, even after COVID kind of died down. We're still in the office. We're not really fully remote. We allow a little bit of a hybrid schedule, but I prefer to go to the office. I don't work very well at home. I enjoy that. But I'm very fortunate. I know it's a little different for me than even most of my coworkers. I spend three days in the office or so every week and at least two days out in the field. Which is, I love that. So I get to go to the plants that we're working on. We're currently in construction on one of the designs that I spearheaded when I first started. So it's kind of cool to see it start from our study phase all the way to now they're constructing it. So I go meet with the guys out there, walk around and inspect just to make sure what we envisioned is what's going on out there. And then we're also serving as a third-party construction manager on a quarter of a billion-dollar construction project. So there's a lot of moving parts to that. And so I spend one day currently out there as well. So a lot of behind the computer, a lot of at the desk, a lot of just pure number crunching design work which has its ups and downs. I prefer the hands-on stuff. So that's why I kind of was like opting-in to these opportunities to get out in the field and I love that. Not everybody gets to do that. So getting out in the field is unique. So I don't want to be like, oh, everybody gets to do that. But there are opportunities, sometimes, that pop up and if you put your name in the hat, then you can go down that road. 

[00:04:22,895] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So for others who are interested in those opportunities, as they try to think ahead, how they can be most competitive, is there particular advice you have to offer? Are there certain skills that you recommend they really develop? 

[00:04:35,435] MATTHEW SNYDER: I would say my first good opportunity was when I did the co-op and I I basically went out to a plant that was just ending construction and in the commissioning phases. So I had hands-on, a little, tweaking construction work. But also startup and commissioning, which is not everybody gets that too. So I was very fortunate in that way. That helped me, kind of, like people asked me if I want to do that and then just being willing to. I do mostly clean water. I do water purification, but the resource recovery part is wastewater. And so I do a little bit of wastewater. And so one of the, that big construction project, is a wastewater plant. And so not everybody really wants to go to a wastewater plant every week. It's not the best smelling space. So I was just I'll go it. And I very much enjoyed it, so I excelled a little bit at it. And then now we're doing the water plant that I helped design. So it smells a little better. It's a little more fun, but it's cool to see exactly what you were trying to envision being there actually being constructed in that in that place. 

[00:05:36,050] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So what I'm hearing is a lot of curiosity, and a willingness to do things that everyone else isn't excited to do. 

[00:05:42,935] MATTHEW SNYDER: When I first started going out to the wastewater plant, the project manager who was actually out there full-time was like, oh, I couldn't really get anybody out here. You are here every week and I was like, Yeah, this is great. Like selfishly, I was like, I get to get out of the office one day a week. This is awesome. It's never a dull moment. That's the answer. That's what I'm saying. I just got last night at 08:00, I got a text from one of the construction guys out at the plant that we're constructing. There's always something going on, especially with rain coming, that's a big thing, we're trying to pour concrete and that's not fun, right? 

[00:06:16,070] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So what's been one of your greatest challenges? 

[00:06:19,085] MATTHEW SNYDER: Let's see, I think the hardest part is, school is school, and working is much different. I took a class when I was at Cornell, I think it was during my masters, and maybe it was that extra semester kind of in-between, where it was like apart masters part not, where we actually partnered with some old Cornell students who were working for an engineering firm and they said, hey, here's our design project. We're doing on the side, but you guys take a stab at it. And they bounced questions off us, which was great. And that helps tremendously, but it still was just barely dipping my toe in the water of all of the moving parts. And there was a big, when I first started, I mean, it's a little different because I first started it was what, September of 2020 in which we all know what was going on then. And so it was a little harder to get your groove because most people were working from home. I went into the office most days, but it was really just me and my boss and the CEO of the company. But it was hard to take that leap into, there wasn't really like a, here's how you do things. It's kind of, you kind of figure it out because everybody does it a little bit different. Not everybody does A to Z the same way. And learning that, like I said, was a little bit more difficult because of the timeframe of what was going on in the world. But I think even some of our new people that are starting now, I've tried to kind of be like, here's all this stuff I did two years ago. Take a look at it. You don't have to do it exactly like that. But I remember asking people like, how do I do this? And I was a little afraid to be like point-blank. How do you do that? 

[00:07:49,430] CHRISTA DOWNEY: And yet you try, you do ask, and you do move forward. And that's one of the things that has served you well in your career it seems. 

[00:07:57,485] MATTHEW SNYDER: I learned early at my co-op, it's better to ask a million questions than to not. And that was, I think that was the number one thing that helped me when I did my work down there was if something went wrong, I got on my phone, I called my boss and I said, hey, here's what's happening, here's what I want to do. Does that sound about right? Or I have no idea, or anything. And I think a lot of people just kind of would have tried something or maybe not have tried anything, been too afraid to try something. And it's better to at least try and try to get some sort of ambition out there and willingness to try to do something is kind of the biggest difference. I think not everybody is willing to kinda just succeed or fail. Not that, it's not black and white. 

[00:08:41,195] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So initiative, and courage, and that willingness to try. That's great advice. Thank you. What would you say is the impact of your work? 

[00:08:49,400] MATTHEW SNYDER: We were actually just brainstorming this as a group because a lot of people turn the faucet on and they get water. Not a lot of people understand. I don't want to say they don't understand. Not a lot of people know exactly. I mean, my one construction project is $22 million just to build probably enough treatment for just a small town just south of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. So just for 12 million gallons a day, which sounds like a lot, but it's really not that much water is $22 million. So this infrastructure, it's very big and a lot of people don't know about it. So we're trying, as younger professionals, as we call ourselves in our group, we want to get more people out there. Last year we had our group of interns from the whole company come and we toured everything, even including, we work with civil engineers like myself who do just water. We have civil engineers that do more structural work. We have electrical engineers that do kind of like wiring and instrumentation. And then we also have civil engineers that do more of like water resources. So more like storage reservoirs and dams and whatnot. So we all have to work together. So we brought all of those interns. So not even somebody who would even work on a water planet, just here's what it looks like. Here's, here's what happens. And especially now they just come a week or so ago, the EPA announced their new rules for PFOS and PFOA stuff and that has a big impact on the work that we're doing. So kind of just yes, these are just harmful forever chemicals and yes, they're bad. But now what we're running into is we need a little bit more public trust. So we need people to understand what happens at a water planet more so than just, oh no, the EPA says we can't have any of these things and do we have them? I don't know, so we need we need a little bit more community engagement, I think, as our goal, at least our goal that we kind of brainstormed. I said, hey, let's go to high schools. Let's get some high school students out. Walk around these water plants and whatnot, just they don't have to even care. I just want them to know what it looks like, what happens from the lake to when you turn your tap. 

[00:10:54,185] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I love that idea of engaging high schoolers and bringing them in. You're educating them about water, which is important regardless of what they do. And some of them might be intrigued enough to pursue this line of work. I can see how that's a challenge, educating the public. And I love that you're coming together to talk about that and tackle them. One thing that we talked about earlier is this MEng project that you worked on during COVID. Can you say more about that? 

[00:11:20,180] MATTHEW SNYDER: We did a little bit of a study for the Ithaca water treatment plant. They get their water from 13 or so miles away from one of the creeks in the lovely Ithaca area, which I do miss sometimes. And what was happening as they were getting manganese, which fouls up their membranes, basically. Thankfully the membranes do stop most of it. And that's why personally, I love membranes, but if they get fouled up, they can get irreversible fouling, or if they're just get fouled up, you get higher pressures and you can't treat as much water. And they have, there's a way to treat for manganese, but because it was 13 mi away, they, they knew too late. So when they're getting plugged up, if they go and treat it, they still had several, I think it was four to 6 hours worth of water that was gonna be really messy and dirty and hard to clean. And then on the contrary side, if they dosed too much upfront 13 miles away, by the time that they knew that they had been dosing too much, the water was purple and it's not like fluorescent purple. Let's just get like a little purple tint to it. But people notice that. And if you turn your turn your faucet on and it looks different than what your normal, even if it smells different, no one wants that. So you can't just overdose even though that's a harmless chemical and it wouldn't matter, but you can't just do that. I would say after we do all the necessary things, That's probably 60 to 65% of what we do. The other, you know, 35-40% is for taste and odor and happy customers. So it's not necessarily a 1,000% necessary, but we want everybody to trust their water and we want everybody to have good tasting water and you don't want anything to smell bad. So at the same time, we can't just overdose and say "oh well", right? So we worked on kind of predicting what happens. Rainfall, do we have more dissolved oxygen? Are we dissolving this manganese that's precipitated out? We're now re-dissolving it into the water. And we came up with a calculator of sorts, I guess is the best way to call it. Hey, how much rain did you get yesterday? What's the temperature outside? What's the stream flow? So the more flow, the more bubbles get into the water, the more oxygen can get in the water that can oxygenate these little manganese cells. And basically I said, okay, based on all these parameters, we would suggest you dose X or maybe you should dose X for a little bit, but then you need to back off, right? Because you have a four hour detention time before you even knew what you were doing. It wasn't a closed pipe. And unfortunately we didn't get to get as far as we really would have liked. We really wanted to get some really great data and get hands-on and really troubleshoot through our calculator a lot more. We did present them with a tool that I hope was somewhat useful, but because of COVID and not being able to get in front of everybody because their critical water, you know, water is critical infrastructure, so you don't want, especially during that time we were locked down. Can't go near, the operators were getting sick and nobody was getting your water. 

[00:14:26,465] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Yes, you're right. This is such an important part of our daily lives that we all take for granted. And it's interesting that you had such a strong technical education and experience before graduating, as well as experienced thinking about the communication issues, the PR that goes into this and what the general public is expecting of your work? 

[00:14:52,385] MATTHEW SNYDER: Yeah. That was honestly, that was one of the main reasons why I picked the route to go down with that MEng project, was, there was some technicality involved to it, but for the past four-and-a-half years, that was my life was technicality, that was Cornell is boom, boom, boom. So it was nice to get an introduction into people interaction as well. Even if it was just the operators of the water treatment plant. Which is something that I do today all the time. I mean, I really rely on their input when I'm designing because I want them to have a good time operating it. And I don't know, I can say, oh, I hope this sounds, in theory that sounds great. And they could be like we never do it that way, it's too hard. 

[00:15:34,640] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Interesting. So you're clearly a learner. Have you thought about what's next for you in your learning and professional development? 

[00:15:42,575] MATTHEW SNYDER: Well, so I've been working now for almost three years with the masters. So you need four years of experience and then you can apply to become a professional engineer. So come August, September time I will have that because you can count your masters year as as one year. So then I will be applying for the-it's more of a technicality to be applying part-as long as you pass the test and you get the experience and you get the professional, professional engineers that you worked for to sign off, you pretty much become one. So around that time, I will probably, well, more than likely, be becoming a professional engineer. I've come this far and that's a really big step. Not every engineering discipline is it that big of a step. Definitely, for civil engineers were stamping critical infrastructure. We're stamping things that people walk in, drive on, every single day. I'm stamping how to clean your water that you drink. So hopefully you would trust that I did a lot of schooling and that I know what I am doing. So once I pass that threshold, I've thought about furthering, I really, like, I've said a million times and I really love this idea of membranes and it really started with my co-op and doing unconventional things with these membranes. So I really want to apply that. I have gone to a few conferences with my boss and I've kind of hinted to him a little bit like here, here's what I want to do. So I don't know if that looks like more school. I don't know if that looks like I just kind of getting nitty-gritty, getting my hands dirty so that I can gain that expertise, and other people might trust me to design that, where I am now or, or what that really looks like. But that would be the next step is continuing my, my knowledge of these systems. 

[00:17:28,765] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Well, there's a lot of possibility and we need your expertise and skill set. This is great. Are you ready for the speed round? 

[00:17:36,625] MATTHEW SNYDER: Sure. 

[00:17:38,725] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Okay. So you're a hard worker, you're a learner. What do you do for fun and relax, re-energize? 

[00:17:45,395] MATTHEW SNYDER: I'm big golfer. So that's the one thing about being in Texas. You can golf year-round and that's my favorite, actually. Up in upstate New York. My parents are from there. My uncle owns a golf course, so we go back up there in the summers and play with him, which is very nice. 

[00:17:57,950] CHRISTA DOWNEY: And what's one place you go for information to stay current in your work? 

[00:18:02,165] MATTHEW SNYDER: The biggest thing is I'm a member of a AWWA, which is the kind of the more water side. There's also WEAT and other items, but a AWWA for me. They have this really cool online resource that you get access to, which has all of their publications and you can search by keyword. And that's a very good starting point because a lot of people are doing a lot of really good work that they rightfully so wanted to publish and get out there. So if you can find something there. Just reading their journal articles, but what people are doing new is probably my favorite. And then they have some of the standards, the standards to design, as well as in our company, we have that, but if we don't have one, I can go and download it because I'm a member. 

[00:18:44,735] CHRISTA DOWNEY: And finally, if I heard you correctly, you said that you had been interested in membranes since childhood, maybe I misunderstood, but a final speed round question is, if you were not doing this work right now, what would you be doing? And which is closest to what you dreamed of when you were a child? 

[00:19:04,115] MATTHEW SNYDER: Well, I grew up around water, so my mom went to Cornell as well actually. And she she graduated from the Civil Environmental Engineering School. She ended up becoming a lawyer, but she did water rights law, environmental law, and that sort. So I grew up around water. That was always in the back of my mind, kind of my passion. I went to Cornell. I was like I'm going to go to Cornell. It's a good, amazing school, but I'm not going to do what you did. I'm going to go do this. Found my way into Civil Environmental Engineering with the water focus. So I think I was kind of always meant to, regardless of how it turned out. But I originally wanted to apply this knowledge, not necessarily in a consulting role. I'm glad that this is where I ended up, but for right now, I'm glad this is an invaluable experience. And getting, like you said, next steps, we'll figure out what, what, what's the best long-term. But right now this is perfect and even the short-term future, this is perfect. But applying this knowledge to, as my mom always said, water is the next oil. So that's my...and it's a little bit better for the environment. 

[00:20:06,680] CHRISTA DOWNEY: One thing that comes up is how important access to clean water is for everyone across the globe. And how do we balance that with how expensive this infrastructure is? 

[00:20:21,080] MATTHEW SNYDER: Here in Texas, we have this route called the Texas Water Development Bureau. And they are open for particularly more remote communities that don't have a lot of revenue, maybe to, fundraise or raise taxes or anything to get the necessary funding to build critical clean water infrastructure. So the Texas Water Development Board actually, I'm working on a project right now where they had originally funded it back in 2007 to give, I think it's six or seven rural cities in West Texas. This beautiful multimillion dollar membrane plant that gives them amazing water. They're doing a great job and so we're going to expand it a little bit more. But that was a direct product of this funding source. So this is something that people who we want, we need to get this out there. And so this is important. So I know that in the state of Texas, we have those alternate funding routes which we encourage our clients to use. And we have actually a whole team inside of our company that specializes in the application process and everything that can help us from start to finish. 

[00:21:33,905] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much for joining us today. 

[00:21:38,885] MATTHEW SNYDER: Thank you for having me. 

[00:21:45,520] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode, where we'll be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable and more sustainable world.

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