Published October 20, 2025

Dozens of MSU graduate students, postdocs, and professors gathered on Oct. 16, 2025, for an Early Career Professionals Networking Event hosted by the MSU Water Alliance. The event focused on access to national meetings, leadership opportunities, and how to secure visibility early on in your water career.

Guest speakers Glen and Patricia “Patty” Daigger, co-founders of One Water Solutions, a water engineering and innovation firm, spoke to attendees via Zoom about the importance of entering professional organizations early and contributing beyond academia. Glen, a former president of the International Water Association (IWA), explained that the organization’s Young Water Professionals (YWP) program was designed to give young researchers responsibility beyond observation. 

“What it [YWP] does is, on a competitive basis, selects about a dozen individuals that go through a leadership development program that has three components,” he said. “There’s skills development, there’s mentoring, but the biggest part of it is projects.”

Patty described projects from the first cohort of the IWA’s YWP leadership program, which worked in communities facing severe water scarcity. 

“Most of the projects centered around [developing] countries or countries where water was of such low availability,” she said, reflecting on how participants adapted to their new environments in real time. “The amazing skills these young people developed floored me. They were working with very limited resources and still managed to deliver powerful education to the people in these communities. It was absolutely outstanding.”

Addressing the challenges associated with attending national or international meetings, Joan Rose, director of the Water Alliance and Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research at MSU, brought up funding.

“It’s not always easy to get the money; that’s always been the issue,” Rose said. “How do you pay for your travel, your hotel, your registration? So we [the Water Alliance] decided we would fund some of that.”

During the event, the Water Alliance offered a $2,500 travel reimbursement to one early-career attendee to support them presenting at a national conference of their choice.

Story by Aja Witt