ALEX TIDEMAN, 21, MINNEAPOLIS

Job: Irrigation maintenance, University of Minnesota

Pay: $8.75 per hour

What do you do exactly? I install pipe and sprinkler heads on campus and do maintenance on the irrigation systems. [He also attends the university, majoring in math.]

Are you going to have to do irrigation work around the new football stadium on campus? They installed 900 sprinkler heads, and we are responsible for maintaining all of them. I have a feeling a lot of them are going to be kicked off by students after football games.

Why is it important to keep the university properly irrigated? They told us that a prospective student makes a decision about whether or not they want to attend here within the first two minutes of being on campus. So if we have the grass as green as possible and all of the flowers looking good, it significantly helps improve students' outlook of the campus.

How much water does the university use to irrigate? There's about 30,000 sprinkler heads on campus, so we use a lot of water. The goal is to give every piece of turf an inch and a half of water per week, so every square inch of grass feels like it got an inch and a half of rain.

That's a lot of sprinkler heads. How do you keep the system working? All of the piping is underground and then there are control valves that go to an electronic clock that is programmed to run at certain times. We have to make sure the sprinklers are rotating to the right spot and they're not broken. It's all electronic and it's run on a main computer system.

Has anyone given you a hard time for using so much water? No, we've never had that. People sometimes ask us what we're doing and they want to know how to do it at their homes, because they're interested in having underground irrigation. But nobody's ever said, "You guys are wasting water."

What is the best part of your job? I guess getting to be outside all the time and not being tied down in one spot. I get to go all over and explore the campus.

ALEX ROBINSON