Patricia Corbett Interview

Interview of Patricia Corbett, graduate studies in Environmental Science, 1974-1976
Date of Interview: October 26, 2003
Interviewer: Kim Mitala
Transcriber: Brian Guelich
Edited B. McCay October 14, 2004

PC: I started in September of 1974. It was basically a one-year masters program: 30 credits, 15 each semester. You had to take oral exams and write a thesis, too, although what I think I used was a paper from one of my courses. What you had to submit wasn't really strenuous. Then you had to come and take oral exams. So, I finished my course work up by the summer of '75. I didn't come back and take my orals until March of '76 so my degree was dated May of '76.

Q: So were you not an undergrad here?

PC: I was just a grad student. I was not an undergrad.

….

PC: Ok, because there were TAs there. Pete Strom, Don Deiso and Jorge Berkowitz were TA's and they had been undergrads there, I think.

Q: Which program were you in? What were you getting your masters for?

PC: It was a master's in Environmental Science. That's what I have my degree in from Cook. Actually, the diploma says Rutgers University but everything was on the Cook campus.

Q: Did you say you lived in the Co-op, like a female agricultural building?

PC: No, that's where the offices were located and I worked there. I worked about 15 hours a week for two semesters from Sept. '74 thru May of '75. They placed me in housing on the Livingston campus. I don't think there was any graduate housing on Cook so I got placed on the Livingston campus.

Q: I'll look into that and see. Maybe there was only undergrad housing, because I know that that's when all the housing just started.

PC: Yes, because I didn't live there and then I ended up moving out. I didn't stay on the Livingston campus too long. I got an apartment in Bound Brook with a woman I went to college with. Most of the grad students had been undergraduates there and they had gone in together on houses in New Brunswick . I don't think they offered graduate housing on campus.

Q: I know now the graduates are either in the Starkeys, they only have limited space in the Starkeys, and I think, I'm not even sure if they can go in the Corwins. For the most part, there are not really too many places for the grad. Actually, I think there is one building two buildings down from the Nielson Dining Hall. Did you ever go to the Nielson Dining Hall?

PC: Oh yes, I do remember that. Yes, you know at lunchtime and what not.

Q: So, you said you worked in the entomology building?

PC: Entomology and Environmental Sciences shared the building. I worked for the Department of Environmental Science and I think the chairman was Kaplowski, I think that was his name. Dr. Manganelli was one of the professors there. Dr. Genitelli was another professor and they all had offices there. It was kind of a weird building because it was a zigzag of hallways and stuff. John Cirillo was another teacher. He didn't have his Ph.D. but he was one of the professors. He worked for Genitelli in a separate building. It was a little house that was across the parking lot; that's where Don Deiso and Jorge Berkowitz had their offices. They were teaching assistants.

Q: When you came in to get your masters, did you know if they weren't accepting women prior to that?

PC: No, it's just that there were very few women. I think there were only three of us in the class that year and about 30 men in the masters program, possibly more men. There were 3 of us in the masters program. … I remember another woman who was a TA, but primarily most of the women that were associated with the department were secretaries.

Q: So, most of your teachers were men and not women and most of the women were undergrads?

PC: We really didn't have much contact with the undergrads. In classes it was basically just myself and 2 other women and mostly men. In fact, Dr. Manganelli was funny, he would kind of take the women under his wing. You were assigned a professor as your advisor. He wasn't my advisor, Dr. Genitelli was my advisor, but still he would call me into his office and check out the courses I was going to take and everything else. So, he kind of lived up to his Italian—not so much macho but debonair—reputation. He was very interested in the women, what we were doing and how we were doing in our courses. His specialty was the air field, air pollution, so he always kind of pressured us into taking air courses. Everybody who went there that year ended up getting an EPA grant to pay for education, which only cost $410.00 a semester at that point in time. We all got EPA grants. The grant that I got was through the air program, so I was required to take a class each semester in air pollution. So, in the second semester, Dr. Manganelli twisted my arm into taking Air Sample & Gas Analysis. There was another air class offered that semester which I would have preferred to take but he kind of pressured, saying “Oh no, you really want to take this.” So, it ended up being a Friday afternoon class and lab, not my favorite, to say the least. It was interesting.

What I really remember is that in the second semester I took Solid Waste Administration, which is an area I was really interested in and I was the only person--I think there was only one other woman in the class and there were about 15 men, this was 1975--and I was the only person who argued that we could get Americans to recycle. Back in 1975, nobody was recycling and everybody, including the professor in the class, said, “Oh no. Americans are too lazy, they'll never do it.” I said, “No, if we can start with the kids and we make it un-American, the way they did in WWII. We could get people to recycle.” Basically, everybody else thought I was crazy, but now look at it. We took a field trip in the spring of 1975 from that class and we saw the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island where they ended up taking everything from the World Trade Centers and sifting through it. We went to see it, and it was funny because, at that point, they had the barges coming down from NY. They had these big crane operators that would take the cranes that would scoop up the garbage, dump it into the trucks and take it to a different section of the landfill. And I remember that those guys told us that they were making $17,500 per year. We were all grad students and we were thinking that we were on the wrong end of this business. My first job out of grad school paid only $12,000 a year. We knew we weren't going to be making that kind of money.

Q: I remember seeing a newspaper article about recycling in the Green Print but I don't remember what year exactly, but the headline was “Cook begins its Recycling,” so did you take a big part in that?

PC: No, I didn't because at that point I really couldn't get anybody to give it any serious thought. At that point there weren't any markets for recycling products or anything else like that.

The way I ended up getting my first job is kind of interesting. I was working in the department when they had a conference there in March of '75 during spring break. It was on solid waste and solid waste practices. I was working in the office helping stuff the envelopes and send out the notices about the conference, so I got to attend some of the sessions. One day they had a catered lunch and the secretary said, “Come on, have lunch, you helped.” So I was sitting in this classroom with the secretaries and this man from Puerto Rico came in and sat down. He started talking to us and everybody else in the room except me was a secretary. Since I was the only one going to school, he said, “Oh, come to Puerto Rico if you want a job.” So he gave me his business card. His name was Santo Rohena and he worked for the Environmental Quality Board down there, which was the commonwealth government's equivalent to the DEP. At that point, Prof. Genitelli and John Cirillo and some other professors in other departments had formed a consulting company and were doing environmental impact statements, which was becoming a very lucrative business. They had pretty much promised me a job with this consulting company. They would get grad students to start working there and not pay them a whole lot of money. We were used to being struggling grad students. But you would get some experience and after a couple of years you could go off and work somewhere else. So, I recall I wasn't really looking for a job. I had sent a resume down to Mite\re Corporation, which is in Northern Virginia , and they were flying me down there for an interview. As a grad student, getting flown down there and put up in a hotel was a big deal. So, anyway, I went for that interview. In the summer of '75 there was a downturn in the economy, at least in the environmental field. All these places lost contracts, contracts didn't get renewed or get funded. So, the consulting companies that these professors had didn't have any work and they weren't going to be able to offer me a job.

I flew down to Virginia and stayed in the hotel and the next day I went for the interview. Well, they forgot I was coming for this interview. They had also lost some government contracts. They were going to hire 60 people, but now they weren't going to hire anybody. Fortunately, there was a Cook grad there and I had his name so I called him up and he had me talk to some people but they didn't have any jobs at that time. So, I sent a resume to Puerto Rico and he circulated my resume around down there. I was moving back home, it was the beginning of October, and this man from Puerto Rico called me and hired me over the phone. It was a job doing Environmental Impact Statements which was my second interest, solid waste was my first interest. I thought, “Well, this is great! I'll be doing something I really want to do.” So, I went to work in Puerto Rico in November all because of this conference that Rutgers had and because the secretaries invited me to lunch. It worked out really well, but when he gave me his business card, I didn't think I needed it but I kept it because you never know what's going to happen.

It was the best thing I ever did because I originally had my oral exams scheduled for September. I had taken a geography course in the spring semester and I had papers to do throughout the course and a paper due at the end. I didn't get it in at the end, so I took an incomplete. I finished the paper over the summer and submitted it to the professor. Well, I scheduled my orals and I came in September to take them but the grade for the incomplete hadn't gotten in the system yet. I showed up to take my orals that morning all nervous and they said, “We can't give them to you because you have an incomplete in this course.” I said, “I turned this paper in” and they said, “Well, we can't do it.” Then I got the offer in October for the job and I went to Puerto Rico in November. When I came back home to visit in March of '76, I scheduled my orals. It was the department chairman and Prof. Genitelli and, I think Manganelli maybe John Cirillo was in there, but at least 3 or 4 professors. I was ready to diagram my sewage treatment plant with the flow rate in the different areas and everything else. I was all ready to do all that and all they did was ask me about my job in Puerto Rico . They had never had a student go and work in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico before. I was working for the commonwealth government, so they were very interested in what I was doing. They asked me about the director down there and Santos Rohena, this man they knew from the conference the year before. So, here I was, all nervous and ready for whatever kind of question they might ask me and they basically just wanted to know about my job and what project I was reviewing. I got off lightly there.

Q: Did you go for any further education after that?

PC: I went to Law School at Rutgers University in Camden at night. I started that in '82 and finished in '86. I went at night for that; it takes 4 years to get a law degree at night. I really enjoyed my time on the Cook Campus in the Cook program. At the time, I didn't realize that it had just started because when I did research for grad schools in the fall of '73, it was listed as Cook College . It's interesting, too, that all of us who were there had all applied to the University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill . The people who were there opted to go to New Jersey and then sometimes they would complain about NJ. That made me mad from time to time and I would say, “If you don't like it, go to Chapel Hill , then.” Everybody got money and we were getting everything paid for. Most of those people had gone to Rutgers University as undergraduates so they were all familiar with the area. We became friends and partied together, all young people just out of college. And a lot of the TAs were very young. It was an up and coming field, environmental science.

Q: So who are some of the undergrads that you remember?

PC: Ones that had been undergrads there? John Czapor; in fact, he ended up working in Region 2 of the EPA in New York City . I don't know if he still works there. John Mateo was another one and he worked for Region 2 in New York City and then worked at the Edison Labs. I think he is working for a consultant now. Bob Titleman; he went out west, I think, Idaho or something. Mike Darter ended up going to medical school in Mexico or Italy . John Accardi worked in Region 2 for a while. These guys had an apartment together in downtown New Brunswick and were all situated because they had been undergrads there.

Q: Where did you take your classes?

PC: I was all over the Cook campus. When I came to my nephew's graduation in 2002 at Cook, I noticed all the buildings surrounding Passion Puddle. All of those buildings were where we took the classes. The offices were down and around the corner; you had to zigzag to get to them. There was this real old one story building that we shared with Entomology, it was a kind of convoluted building, but the classes were all around Passion Puddle basically. The Air Sample and Gas Analysis class, now that was further away. That was not around that area. It was a little distance away. It was off Route 1.

Q: Did you notice if there are more buildings around Passion Puddle now?

PC: Oh yeah, there are definitely more buildings on campus. I meant to try to pull out my boxes, I'm sure I have some stuff--if nothing else, my grades and stuff. I must have party pictures. When I worked in the department, there was one guy who came from Massachusetts and he and his wife got married after they graduated from college in May. They came from New Bedford , MA . They were Portuguese and I had never met people of Portuguese background. The department gave her a job and they had an apartment in South River because they were married and there was no housing for married people. So, they gave her a job in the department working as a secretary and she and I became friendly because I was working in the department as a student and we had a Halloween party at their apartment in South River . That group really had a lot of fun together. We went on ski trips and were a real cohesive group that year.

Q: Did you ever get involved with any extracurricular activities? Did you ever go to Ag Field Day?

PC: We did go to Ag Field Day. I think because I was only there for a year I didn't get as involved with the school. All these people who had been undergrads there, they were really into Ag Field Day; that was a real big deal. I went to that, it was a big deal even back then.

Q: Even though you weren't there long, how do you feel about Cook? Do you feel you made a good decision?

PC: Oh, definitely. After going to a small all-girls' college, it was nice to be in a classroom with men, where you could become friends with them and exchange ideas. I really was very happy at Cook. It was a great experience. I was interested in Solid Waste, so it gave me a chance to study in the area I was interested in. I thoroughly enjoyed my year at Cook. It enabled me to get a job in my field. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology and wanted to get into the environmental field and I don't think I would have been hired had I not attended Cook. I worked in Puerto Rico for a year and three months, then came back and started working for NJ DEP in Trenton . I worked there almost 3 years. Now I have been with EPA in Philadelphia , Region 3, for 24 years. I really felt the masters gave me a good background in air pollution, solid waste, and water pollution. It was a smart move, as far as I'm concerned.

Q: You said you had looked at UNC-Chapel Hill, were there a lot of schools you looked at before deciding?

PC: There were a few, but environmental science was just starting. There were ecology programs out there but environmental science was just starting to build up and schools were just starting to realize that there was a need for people with that kind of a background. So it was kind of the beginning of it. Of course, the first Earth Day was April 22 nd 1970 . People were getting more attuned to that type of thing. It was a good program. Originally I was going to go for ecology and then I thought, “Well, if I go for environmental science I will probably always have a job.” Unfortunately, I think pollution is going to be around for a long time.

Q: Did you notice from the advertisements you saw at the time what the big topics were on campus at the time?

PC: I think because I was in the one year master program, 15 credits each semester, it was kind of concentrated thing that was really my focus. Ag Field Day was a big thing, but then I was focused on getting a job, so there really wasn't a lot of time for that stuff. Now there is a lot of emphasis on community service in high school and college, there really wasn't back then. We were looking to get good grades, get out, and get a job. There really wasn't a focus on what we could do on campus. I was working 15 hours on campus and between that and going to classes and doing the papers and studying, we did manage to party but there weren't any real grass roots movements that I can think of.

Q: Do you remember any interesting activities from Ag Field Day?

PC: They had a big tug-of-war over the pond. That I do remember. I think they had a big bonfire at night. The tug-of-war was a big thing.

Q: What would you say is one of your most notable memories at Cook?

PC: I would have to say the whole newness of everything. The students were all just out of college and a lot of the TAs were very young. We were all very committed to trying to help the environment. Everybody was young and idealistic. We thought after we got these degrees we be able to get out there and be able to clean up all the pollution. Some of the professors were a little older but it was an exciting field. You felt like you were going to make a contribution to the planet. All the students got along real well.