Water Resources, including Watershed Assessment, Stream Restoration, Stormwater Management, Floodplain Analysis and agency permitting

I like that every day is completely different. Some days I'm working on only marketing items and trying to win work. That's something completely different that they don't really teach you in school, so it was a challenge at first. But I love a good challenge. There’s also variety when you're doing Water Resources work. Every single day is different. There is never the same problem, which means it's never the same solution. I don't get bored because it's always something new.

I wear many hats in my current position. I'm at a smaller firm where I do office management, business development and marketing. But I am also a technical mentor and still do technical work. Currently I do stormwater management engineering, stream restoration design, inspection of construction, and watershed planning.

For example, right now I'm working on a really cool project for school campus that includes a high school, middle school, and an elementary school. We are planning their storm water best management practices.

So I do a variety of work and variety of water resource engineering.

My advice is to always say "yes" to things, unless it's something that you really, really don't want to do. Saying "yes" is how I got to where I am now. I like to say that I have no "no button". I use my "yes button" all the time for new opportunities that come with my way. You'll be surprised at where saying "yes" ends up taking you - you just never know.

I majored in civil engineering at Penn State and my focus was in structural engineering. So I took all of those structural classes, like concrete design and steel design. I definitely wanted to be a structural engineer when I graduated. My first job was at a very large company and they had me rotating through all of their various sections, because there wasn't a ton of work when I graduated. So I got to test a little bit of each field within civil engineering. I did some transportation work, bridge inspections, highway design, etc.

One day a water resources engineer came up to me and said she really need this grading done for a stream restoration plan. I kind of shrugged and thought, well I never say no to anything. So I said, sure give that to me. I did the grading for her and then the next thing I know she asked me to run a hydraulic model for her (or at least cut the cross section so they could run the HEC-RAS computer model). I thought, yeah I can do that too.

I ended up really liking stream restoration work. As my career progressed, I decided to focus more on water resources and leaned away from structural engineering.

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