The annual ASCE New Faces of Civil Engineering provide reassurance to anyone concerned that the profession’s future will remain in good hands.
These 10 young professionals have each accomplished more in the first decade of their careers than most people manage in a lifetime.
There is the structural engineer who was a top-ranked tennis star in his home country as a teenager. There's the environmental engineer...
Thalia Valkanos can’t be accused of playing things too safe.
Or to use a football metaphor, given her (self-proclaimed) status as ASCE's resident NFL expert, Valkanos doesn’t send in the kicking team when it’s fourth-and-goal in her career. She’s playing for touchdowns.
Consider that during the last decade, she has switched majors, changed career paths, uprooted her life for a new city where she knew no...
Brian Phan’s parents had a simple, if daunting, plan as they made their way out of poverty in Vietnam back in the early 1990s and moved their young family to Los Angeles.
“Their goal was to allow their kids to do well in school, get good grades if they can, and hopefully accomplish that American dream,” Phan said.
Of course, the Phans had few if any...
It was during the ASCE 2018 Convention. Robin Kemper, earlier that day inducted as the Society president, invited friends and colleagues up to her hotel suite to celebrate the occasion.
Sometime before midnight, there amid the skyscrapers of downtown Denver, someone convinced Joanna Smith to play the piano.
And with that, a gathering of civil engineers became a party.
Pretty soon Smith was playing Beatles classics, mixing...
The Caribbean is one of the most hazard-prone regions in the world.
So, for Daniel Campbell, growing up in the small island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he didn’t necessarily go looking for a career in disaster mitigation – it found him.
In just about the worst kind of way.
“There was a retaining wall failure in my country in September 2008,” Campbell said. “A...
Dana Al-Qadi had every intention of becoming a physician someday.
And not just like a lot of kids do in elementary school when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
She was literally in college studying to be a doctor.
But then …
She had just returned to campus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from a trip to see her extended family...
It was supposed to be a standard speech at her alma mater.
No need for stress, certainly not intense personal exploration.
Yet here Jazzy Quinabo was, digging deep, at a loss for the answer to this seemingly simple prompt: Why did you choose to be a civil engineer?
Five years into her career, she should probably have a handle on such a basic question, right?
Well, as it...
As a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, Alexandre Martinez was surrounded by data.
Climate data from the past. Climate data for future projections.
But one word kept haunting his research: “useful.”
How could he make this data transcend a mere spreadsheet? How could he make this data useful?
He talked it over with a colleague, Tina Korani, professor of new media at San Jose State...
It’s not every day you find a civil engineer whose lifelong passion is writing.
Then again, Anali Martinez Gonzalez is not your everyday civil engineer.
Martinez Gonzalez started “The Nueva Latina” lifestyle blog more than six years ago to share her experiences as a Latina civil engineer living and working in the United States.
“I think what motivated me was the lack of our story being told,”...
Imagine. It’s your senior year of high school. You’ve got a spot on the varsity basketball team. A winter awaits, full of buzzer-beaters and hardcourt heroics.
But instead you give it up for … civil engineering?
Tony Kulesa did just that, passing on basketball season during his senior year in favor of a job-shadowing opportunity at a civil engineering firm in nearby Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Surprising as...
