Sustainability Portfolio 

Introductory Reflective Essay 

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          Hello. My name is Aisha Iyengar and I aspire to create sustainable landscapes that provide ecologically vitality and foster positive expression. Congrats! You are reading one of my first steps in making dream possible: my sustainability portfolio. This portfolio, comprehensive yet brief, is where I show you how I have grown as a student in the development of my technical and interpersonal skills. 

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          Beginning my studies in Landscape Architecture guided me through a world of design, showing me how to look at a landscape and envision it to its highest potential. Balancing the ecological, economic, and social needs of that site are constant aspects that we designers have to facilitate. While I thoroughly enjoy my education at the College of Environment and Design, I often felt a disconnect to my projects and reality. I wanted to start seeing how my work could actually make a difference and what sustainable focused actions actually succeed. I couldn’t quite see how what I was learning in school could actually enrich my community and the environment. 

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          This all changed when I began my coursework for the sustainability certificate. Working through a series of courses that allowed me to see the application of innovative, current, and practical sustainable actions. What set to the stage for these courses was my sustainability seminar. In this course, I got to see how my education at the University of Georgia could translate into a career. Hearing from professionals that just a few years ago were in the same seat that I am in helped me picture where my own work in sustainability could lead me. Speaking and networking with professionals in this classroom environment was crucial to building my confidence to reaching out to sustainability professionals on my own. I have been able to continue using this skills to attend conferences and charrettes. Not only did I learn from professionals, but I also got to engage with my fellow peers in the course in a regular discussion setting. In discussion with my like-minded peers, I was reminded how many people actually care about environmental advocacy  and hope to also bring change locally and globally. The forming of this community encourages me to continue my work, knowing that I have a support from my peers who care about sustainable actions as much as I do. 

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          The skills developed in the seminar, translated into each of my sustainability courses: anchor, social, economic, ecological, and capstone. Introduction to sustainability, my anchor course, gave me the overarching ideas of sustainable practices currently being used. It showed me successful and non-successful projects that have been built, specifically giving examples of ways that environmental issues came about and were mitigated. This course is also where I learned much of the verbiage used in the field. Continuing, my social course: resources, society, and the environment was a geography course. Having studied landscape architecture, at this point I was very comfortable with looking at site specific conditions and ways we can improve the vitality of the environment in the specific location we are working on, yet this course changed my perspective. This geography course took my perspective and widened it dramatically, we spoke about how societal behaviors are effected generationally and create global change. At first this seemed very hard to grasp, yet after connecting the dots, I was able to see how my work in creating suitable built environments could aid in the development of this behavior. 

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          One of my most applicable course taken was my economic course, applied landscape ecology. In this course, alongside my group, I did analysis on a section of the Athens Greenway and proposed how we could improve the site. In my specific section of  the greenway there is a large house-less population. In balancing the city’s wishes and community needs, we had to figure out feasible designs that stayed equitable to whole community. This brought up many economic related issues that we had to work through. Reflectively, at the end of this project we did not provide all of the answers, but we did show small improvements that we hoped could provide outdoor engagement for all members of the community. Design and the environment served as my ecological course and gave me the overview of how my work as a landscape architecture can effect my community, creating positive interactions, benefiting health, and revitalizing ecosystems. While this course was an introductory course to landscape architecture it facilitated my understanding of how I can design my community for better. These courses collectively brought me the technical and applied aspects of sustainability in the realm of landscape architecture, encouraging me to continue my education in hopes to create designs benefiting humans and the environment. They gave me the skills I needed to be able to advocate for my environment.

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          This drive to advocate lead me to my capstone project. This project lead by a team four, allowed me to put all of my new skills to work. Having done photography as a hobby, I was able to blend love for visualization and my passion for sustainability into one project: a documentary focusing on microplastics. My group traveled to the Georgia coast and film professionals that work on reducing the use of plastics and spread knowledge to their communities about this issue, including UGA educators, scientists, students, and staff at the Georgia Sea Turtle center. This summative documentary captured their experiences and helped communicate how marine debris can be detrimental to our environment. We hope that though our advocacy to educate citizens about microplastics in hopes that they are inspired to change their daily plastic use. Creating a documentary was such an exciting and informational experience that I am able to share with my community, I hope to be able to find similar work in creating short films that drive environmental change. 

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          While each of my sustainability certificate course covered specific topics, they each blended together to give me the skills I needed to be able to create my collective capstone project, advocating for the environment. This advocacy is crucial to my future endeavors, school or professional as I hope to create public built environments that can sustain both ecological and human life.