On her Beaver experience…
When I was at Beaver, the standard colleges were all liberal arts, especially within New England. I was one of the few Beaver folks looking outside of New England for my university career. So I was a little different in that regard.
Beaver definitely had a strong science and math program, so when I got to college that helped to make it easier for me to select one of my majors. My career path is a lot different than a lot of people (in my field) in that I did get a Bachelor of Arts degree and I was a double major in math and economics, and then I switched into an engineering field. But when I was at Beaver, while math and science were very strong there wasn’t a push, as I remember, or a focus towards engineering schools.
It was a different time, there was no Internet, we all had a book to read about universities and you had to do a lot more homework yourself to get information on universities and programs. Beaver certainly influenced my undergraduate decision to focus on math and continue with that. Beaver overall was pretty open in terms of giving students a very rigorous and broad education background so you didn’t have to make a decision that narrowly focused your career path.
On starting a new team at Beaver…
I don’t think there’s still a cross-country ski team at Beaver but a few of my fellow graduates and I wanted to have a ski team. We discussed with some of the Beaver teachers how we could get it going and we had a meeting to show student interest. The school was very willing to help fund that. I think we started that in ‘85 or ‘86. It was the first year that Beaver had a ski team and I think it lasted for a while. That just stood out, that if you have a good idea and you can show that there’s interest, it’s not that difficult sometimes to make change happen.
On her career path…
I went to Vanderbilt University and there was, like, one other person I knew there from New England, another Beaver Alum who was a couple of years ahead of me. That’s in Nashville, Tennessee, so very different from New England, especially back in that day. My career started in Washington, DC, working for the U.S. Department of Labor. I was there for a year and then I fled to sunny Southern California for economical higher education opportunities. I went to UCLA for my master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering. From there, I knew I was going to make California my home so I worked for a couple of different places before I ended up at Tetra Tech, my current company.
On her role at Tetra Tech…
Tetra Tech is a global engineering and environmental consulting company. We work on the most important engineering and environmental projects throughout the world. My focus is predominantly on Southern California projects and on regulatory compliance as well as what I call remediation projects, cleaning up the legacy sites in Southern California.
On what a project looks like…
in consulting there really is no typical project for the most part. Some of my projects are design projects where we prepare the documents for contractors to follow, called plans and specifications. Those are usually about six-month projects. Then we’ll work with our client during actual implementation to make sure that the contractor is following all the requirements. Those are more of my shorter duration projects.
A lot of my other projects last a very long time because when you work on environmental projects there’s a long-term process starting with an investigation assessment and identifying what the problems are. Then working through a complete assessment to make sure that you have all the information to identify how you’re going to clean up the site. Then you wait until you get funding to actually clean up the site. Usually, I have a lot of regulatory agencies involved, so there’s a lot of review, a lot of back and forth. Some of my cleanup projects cost over 20 million dollars, so it’s a big gulp for some of my clients. I tend to work on a lot of very complicated projects. I work on projects that are right at the coast, so there are a lot more complications due to tidal influences than some of the other peers in my field. If you talk to people in the Midwest, they don’t have to worry about this issue.
On the greatest challenges of her job…
Time. Time to do everything I need to get done in my day. Our clients are very sophisticated so it can be really challenging to meet their demands and their expectations. Time is probably my biggest challenge. The other thing I would say would be getting funding all at once to complete a project. That can be a really big challenge.
On misconceptions of her profession…
People would be surprised how long it takes to actually complete some of the projects. Sometimes it’s surprising to me how long it takes as well. Sometimes I think we spend more time on paper than we do on actual implementation. It’s just kind of the nature of the beast. A lot of times we have regulatory changes or redevelopment changes to change what we’re doing and we’ll have to go back to the beginning.
I think there’s a misconception that environmental engineering is environmentalism. People say, “Oh you’re an environmental engineer. You’re out with the environmental groups like NRDC.” That’s not the case. We’re not like Greenpeace. And, especially as a consulting company, we are a business. We exist because we have clients and because we’re able to make a profit; we’re not a non-profit. I think that’s the biggest misconception that a lot of young people will have when they come into this field—understanding that at the end of the day it is a business.
On collaboration…
A lot of collaboration is really with our clients—with what we call stakeholders. So working with our clients so that they understand the process if they’re not familiar with it and making sure that at the end of the day they have something that they need that’s useful to them. Within my company, we have 20,000 associates across the globe. So I’ve recently worked with folks from Australia and I work with a lot of folks throughout the U.S. who specialize in some of the fields that I specialize in. Internally we’re very collaborative and externally we’re also very collaborative.
On a skill that Beaver-aged Heather might not believe that she does now…
I wouldn’t have expected to have to have as much financial understanding as I do. What Beaver did provide for me is a writing skill, which is really necessary for any field but especially in engineering. The better writer you are the more successful you will be because a lot of engineering schools don’t emphasize writing and you can see it. It’s night and day.
On advice for a current Beaver student…
My advice for anyone choosing a field similar to mine would be to choose the more technical classes. The softer sciences, a lot of them are environmental science programs and really don’t provide the skill set needed, unfortunately. You really need to have the engineering fundamentals to be really successful in a consulting environment. And to be honest, those are the jobs that are more fun. If you stick to the environmental science jobs, it’s a lot more limited in your career path. The engineer can do what the scientists do but scientists can’t always do what the engineers can do.
