Santa Clara University

Tim Sennott '09

Finding a new perspective in engineering

“Part of education is finding out what you’re good at and how you can use your talents to help,” says mechanical engineering student Tim Sennott ’09, former president of SCU’s Green Club.

Sennott entered SCU as a communications major but switched to biology and became involved with the Green Club. “I met a number of great faculty from the Environmental Studies Institute and elsewhere,” Sennott says, “and I was able to see the issue of sustainability from different angles—from the standpoint of environmental science, from an ethical perspective, and as a technical challenge. I started to think of it in terms of who can we help avoid harm, and whose lives can we improve. How do we help the billions of people in developing countries achieve the standard of living we’ve enjoyed?”

In grappling with those questions, Sennott determined that “being an engineer and having the tools to confront the biggest challenges facing our society just made sense. I’ve come to the realization that to be happy, you have to do what you believe. It meant an extra year to switch to engineering, but it was the right path on which to proceed.”

Sennott credits SCU’s values-based education with focusing his attention on the world’s environmental challenges. “The diversity of this environment and the integration of programs, where engineering students are working with people from biology and business and communications, allows students to see all perspectives—Jesuit and secular, engineering, humanities, business, and science—so they can determine where their responsibility lies, where their accountability begins, and how they need to act. Here, I’m being given the skills and the tools to make a difference.”

And after graduation? “Graduate school, and then work on sustainable design,” says Sennott. “I’d like to solve engineering problems in a more intelligent way—being mindful of the true environmental cost and resource drain, and closing the waste loop.”

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