Engineering alumni on the right track

The state of Maryland is excited about the Purple Line project, because it really brings connectivity to the region that doesn't currently exist in as quick or efficient of form. So the Purple Line is a new light rail transit system, 16 miles going east west in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. It'll have 21 stations, 28 light rail vehicles, and four of our stations are adjacent to the DC Metro system. We connect to Amtrak or the MARC, which is Maryland's regional commuter rail system. For undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I was looking for a real rigorous coursework that would provide me a platform for whatever I wanted to do. And I thought that the engineering program at Virginia Tech was so well thought of and respected that it would be a good platform for that next thing. As it turned out, I really enjoyed civil engineering. Stuck with it, and for my master's, I really wanted to blend engineering in business, and I was able to do that with Doctor Garvin and our research on alternative project delivery, which brought me here. I started out my career working for a construction company, and I spent several years there. I realized that the challenge that kept a lot of very valuable and necessary infrastructure projects from being built was not that we couldn't solve the technical challenges, but rather that there wasn't funding to be able to help these projects be realized. And that question stayed with me, how do we pay for what we build? I began thinking about graduate studies, and Virginia Tech had a very, very strong program in the civil engineering school led by professor Mike Garvin. And I said, this is a good fit. This will be an opportunity to explore that question about how we pay for what we build. I think Virginia Tech does really well is prepare you for the real world. It's not just theoretical, it's really applied. And when you're working on a complex mega project like this, it helps to break things down into steps and kind of solve problems logically and methodically. And I really feel like my coursework and research at Virginia Tech prepared me for that. I think engineering, and especially civil engineering, are one of the best ways to realize the Virginia Tech motto of service. And when you think about civil engineering service, civil society, what people need, what people use every day. And that's really a very satisfying field to see at the end of a project. Here's a facility, here's a service, here's a piece of infrastructure that's making people's lives better every day on a very broad societal scale for access to education, to jobs, to family, to health care. We really are, we're serving the community. So I really get a lot of fulfillment, and it's very rewarding to be delivering something that people are going to use for generations to come as part of their daily lives.