Fourth-year engineering student aims to bring cleaner water to low-income communities

Oil wells stood across the street from where Citlali Rodriguez once played soccer as a child.

In Wilmington, along the Port of Los Angeles, refineries and industrial operations shaped the landscape. The grass in her family's front yard struggled to take root. Her brother had asthma. Once, she watched an oil well catch fire.

"It wasn't until I was older that I realized all the effects this had on my life," Rodriguez said.

Growing up, Rodriguez wanted to be an inventor: someone who built robots to solve everyday problems. As she got older, she realized the profession she had dreamt of was engineering.

When it came time to apply to college, UCLA was the obvious choice, checking all the boxes with its engineering program, financial aid and distance from home. The ultimate deciding factor came down to her experience with the Society of Latinx Engineers and Scientists. During her senior year of high school, she was introduced to SOLES at UCLA and attended its stayover weekend for admitted students.

"It showed me that I would have a community and support system here," said Rodriguez, who arrived at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering in 2022. From the start, she knew she wanted to study environmental engineering, but not exactly which areas.

Faculty mentorship played a key role in shaping her direction. Her advisor, Timu Gallien, a professor of civil and environmental engineering whose research areas include water resources engineering and hydrological monitoring, helped guide her toward opportunities and long-term goals. She also conducted research with Regan Patterson, an assistant professor in the same department, whose work on environmental justice reaffirmed that Rodriguez had chosen the right field.

After taking water resources courses and completing a hydrology capstone project, Rodriguez decided to pursue the water track.

But engineering school has not always been easy. What helped, she said, was a conversation with an upperclassman during one of her hardest quarters about how difficult everything felt.

"He responded, 'Anything worth doing usually is,'" Rodriguez recalled. "I realized that difficulty alone wasn't a reason to give up. If anything, it meant I was working toward something meaningful."

Outside of classes, Rodriguez has gained hands-on engineering experience through the UCLA chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which she joined her freshman year. She is now the project manager for its environmental design project.

"Being able to design and build tangible systems that propose real solutions is incredibly rewarding," Rodriguez said. "It's one of the experiences that truly showed me what engineering can look like in practice."

She has also remained deeply involved in SOLES, serving as secretary and sciences director at its UCLA chapter. Through outreach events and mentorship programs, Rodriguez works with students ranging from kindergarten through community college, many of them from backgrounds similar to her own.

In between school years, she took internships at engineering firms, working in water resources engineering at WSP and later in water and wastewater systems at HDR, where she contributed to a project near her hometown. Visiting the site in person and seeing her work help the community she knew was the kind of moment that she said reassured her decision to pursue engineering.

On track to graduate in December, Rodriguez plans to join the global engineering firm Jacobs as a water engineering intern.

"I especially hope to serve communities that face the most systemic challenges," Rodriguez said. "These communities already have so many barriers to navigate. Access to clean water and a healthy environment shouldn't be one of them."