Renata Sütő

Renata Sütő spent more Friday mornings than she can count wading a tributary of the Porter River with a turbidity meter and a clipboard, part of the program's standing agreement with the county to monitor watershed health above the Founders Hall dam. "It sounds unglamorous until you realize you're one of maybe three people in the state who actually knows what that stream looked like ten years ago," she says. "That data record is the whole reason I got hired — I'd already been reading it for two years before I graduated."

She's now the county's Water Resources Specialist, running the same monitoring program from the other side and mentoring the current cohort of Porter students who rotate through it every fall. "I tell them the fieldwork is the résumé line, not the internship title. Nobody else applying can say they've watched one watershed for a full decade of freeze-thaw cycles."