I remember when I was growing up, people asked “What do you want to do?” At the time, I did not truly know. What I did know was I was good at math and science and loved playing with Legos. I loved understanding how things worked (lost a few good toys this way), and I knew my thought process was different than others. My parents suggested something in STEM, so I had chosen to take drafting and design, and Introduction to Engineering. Between the two classes, I found myself loving the drafting aspects of engineering and the need to think outside the box to achieve the objective set by the teachers. My fondest memories were drafting a 2-foot-long crank shaft by hand in 2 days and creating a marble sorter that would sort 30 different marbles in under 2 minutes.
Over this time, I slowly found myself interested in civil engineering due to the structural focus. So, I went to Widener University to major in civil engineering. During a co-op at Widener University, I experienced construction inspection and found that it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to create designs, not have the oversight to build the design on the plans.
But how did this get me to transportation engineering? Road rage of course! I was home for a weekend during summer classes. I was sitting at a signalized intersection on the side street and the mainline had the green indication. There was not a person in sight in either direction of the mainline. I was getting overly frustrated as it seemed the signal would never change. I thought that there HAD to be a better way or a better design that would erase this annoyance for me. That’s when it clicked, I chuckled and realized, I could be the solution to my everyday headache. I wouldn’t need to question things and why they’re done. I would be able to implement designs that would be safe and efficient for my community.
With that in mind, I knew I needed to find a transportation design related co-op to validate my new career direction. For my second co-op, I was a transportation design specialist. I was drawing ADA ramp designs and designing signing and pavement marking plans. One day, there was an email blast for a volunteer to do a traffic count. I asked my supervisor what a count was and if I’d be allowed to do it. They explained the task and encouraged me to try it out. I started doing traffic counts and camera deployments, here and there.
During one of the counts, I started seeing more than just traffic moving through an intersection, I saw an orchestrated dance between hundreds and thousands of people occurring. It began to fascinate me to not only count the cars, but to watch drivers’ behaviors and see how each acted and reacted differently, but still following the rules of the intersection. It was at that moment I knew I wanted to go into transportation engineering and specifically traffic signal design.
Since then, I’ve gotten to work on signals throughout multiple states and each is different with their standards and preferences, but one thing hasn’t changed: the beautiful dance of a signalized intersection and now I’m the choreographer.