I knew I wanted to be an engineer since early in high school when a family friend gave me a tour of Rockwell International where he worked. I had initially wanted to be an electrical engineer but then, after one class realized that was not for me. My adviser suggested Civil engineering, which is where I found a passion for structural engineering.

I began with Summit in May of—well, began as an intern in May of 2023, worked through that summer and continued working here part time through the following school year and started at Summit full time in August of 2024.

In my time at Summit, I’ve been fortunate enough to see a lot of different types of bridge and transportation projects. Just with some of the storm events we’ve had here in North Carolina, including Hurricane Helene and Tropical Storm Chantel this past summer, we’ve seen a broad variety of work. So every day I feel like I’m working on something different and it’s given me a lot of good experience to see new projects and learn the workflows of different projects under different people.

I would say Summit fostered my career development really by giving me a chance. I came in as an intern who really didn’t know a whole lot, and through the process of an internship I was able to learn things each day through Greg and Jenny, my bosses. And I would say some of the conferences we get to go to as well have really helped me learn some of the programs we use and be successful in using those the way they were intended to be used.

I would say just the diversity that we have here in the office. We have people in every field of civil engineering you can think of and it makes it—you’re around people with different ideas all the time, and you get to hear those ideas and see different perspectives on different projects from different people. All those ideas bouncing around really kind of open your mind up to the potential of what things really could be.

As a Summit intern, I was able to learn the basics of bridge design. Coming out of school, you don’t have—at NC State anyway—there’s no bridge design courses, so everything that you’re learning as an intern is new information. And I was able to learn those things and the design process of different types of bridges, what goes into them, how they’re different. So when I started full time I felt pretty confident in the design work and wasn’t limited to just drawing plans or the entry-level designs. I was able to see a bridge, pick up the design, and pretty much design it start to finish on my own.

As an intern, like I mentioned, when you first start you don’t have any bridge design experience unless you’ve interned with other firms. So every day was a learning experience. And sometimes it was very difficult because you’re working with people that have been doing it for a while and it feels like they know everything and you know nothing. So you have to push through and be able to stick with it, do your own research, take good notes, and try and use the people that have been doing it for years to learn from.

I would say the project that I’m most proud of is the work that I assisted with last year after Hurricane Helene. I was assigned to a team whose goal was to go out and do damage estimates for sites in Yancey and Rutherford County so FEMA could have these estimates and be able to reimburse DOT for all the damage repairs that they had done.