This year’s National Engineers Week will be the 27th that I have experienced since beginning my professional career as a transportation engineer. However, the start of my journey to becoming an engineer began many years earlier than my first paycheck.
As a child growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I was fascinated with the traffic signals, signs, and markings that I would see as I traveled through the city with my parents. During the many road trips that I took, I marveled at the highways that allowed us to travel to the ocean, drive through the mountains, and to visit that famous mouse in Florida. I spent years using crayons, markers, and colored pencils to draw my own roadways and traffic control devices in spiral notebooks long before I knew what the MUTCD was. I even wrote a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia telling him of my interest in traffic and asking if I could learn more about it from the city. I was rewarded with a visit to City Hall and my very own retired Longshore Avenue street sign that I still have in my house to this day!
My childhood obsession planted the seed that took root to steer down my career path. My seventh-grade counselor was the one who first informed me that the person that designed the traffic signals, signs, and markings that captivated me was a civil engineer. From that point forward I knew that I wanted to be a civil engineer that specialized in transportation. After taking extra STEM classes in high school and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M University, I was able to realize my dream of being a transportation engineer.
Once I entered the profession, I was happy to find that the passion I had for traffic control devices was still as strong as ever. However, what the younger me taking in everything from the car windows never realized was the impact that transportation engineers have on everybody’s daily life. The actions I have taken as a transportation engineer have helped countless people get to where they needed to go safely and efficiently as possible. When people have experienced problems in their travels, the solutions I have been able to offer have been able to make their lives better, even if only a little bit.
Almost everyone has someplace they have to go every day. Children go to school. Employees head to a variety of jobs. Errands of all sorts take place. None of these things would be possible without transportation engineers. When transportation engineers are successful, people in cars, trucks, bicycles, busses, and on foot can do all these safely and in a reasonable amount of time without even considering the many parts of the transportation network that they utilized along the way. Transportation engineers take crashes, injuries, and fatalities involving people they have never met personally because they know those that mean the most to them are also out there on the roads, sidewalks, and trails.
While increasing congestion and more distractions on our roadways may make the tasks of a transportation engineer ever more challenging, there are always moments that provide a reminder of the positive impacts that this profession can have. I go to work each day knowing that my implemented solutions are being taken in by all the people passing by. Maybe one of those people is a young child who will be inspired by what they see and will eventually grow up to help develop solutions to get my children and my grandchildren where they need to go safely and efficiently.