Sunday, November 09, 2008 at 04:48 PM
ConE girls field trip
Hello again! I figure I need to make up for lost time earlier in the semester and as promised I would tell you all about our ConE women field trip this past Friday.
After Wednesday's hectic day Thursday was nice to come, though it ended up being a little more crazy than I had expected! First I had to "teach" ENGR 101 as it was the last class. So I had some of the team members from the Associated Schools of Construction competition teams come talk to the students about how the regional competition was. ISU has 4 teams that compete at the regional level - commercial, residential, heavy/civil and design-build. They went over how the 18 hours of taking a set of plans and putting together a complete estimate, schedule and proposal went along with preparing a 20 minute presentation in front of 5-6 judges. The students really enjoyed it I think! Then my afternoon was filled up with interviews for new peer mentors for the ConE cornerstone learning community and then learning community.
That night I had dinner with a ISU ConE alum female - Gina Sundermann - who is working as a Project Engineer at Weitz Iowa (General Contractor in Des Moines). She was a peer mentor with me 2 1/2 years ago and I am interviewign with them so we were just chatting and catching up. That's another thing that is so great about ISU ConE department - there are so many alumni that are willing to talk with you, go to lunch or dinner, and discuss the industry and classes that they took. Even in the learning community we require students to meet with Industry professionals who we arrange as their Industry Mentor.
Now onto the fun part of the weekend - Friday 14 of us ConE girls met at Town Engineering at 6 AM to head down to Kansas City with Dr. Shane (professor) and Kristin Mauro (advisor) for the day. We got there about 10 AM and upon arrival met some females in all different roles at JE Dunn. We started with a round table of discussion - going around with our names, who we were, what we did, etc and then opened it up for general discussion. It was pretty amazing in the fact that there was a female Superintendent there that pretty much went through more than I could ever imagine. It made me realize how much the world has actually changed since 1985 to now. Us females today are lucky and thankful for the earlier females in the industry that took some heat and harrassment to get where they are. It's a funny thing in how things work, but Cheryl, the superintendent, gets a lot of respect now from guys in the industry and that work on her jobsite. There were so many broad range topics discussed it was incredible! It was definitely things that no one else had ever told me or things that you can learn in a classroom because you can't.
From there we ate lunch and then began our afternoon of jobsite tours. First
we toured JE Dunn's new headquarter building which is basically across the street from the building some of the employees are working out of now. It is going for LEED gold certification. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. If you don't know anything about it and are interested in construction you should definitely research LEED and sustainable construction design. It was pretty cool to see the precast concrete beams being set for the parking lot, which I had never seen.
After that we went to the Performing Arts Centers which consists of two halls that will seat about 1500 and 1800 seats respectively. They are very fascinating in the shape and construction. JE Dunn has 2 tower cranes on the site.
Our last jobsite was 4 sorority houses which the female superintendent was in charge of. They were more simple structures than what we had seen earlier in the day. They are being built out of concrete masonry units (CMU) and pretty rectangular in shape.
It was very interesting to see all the projects going on with JE Dunn. I think all the girls had a wonderful time. In fact, some girls are going to Omaha this coming Wednesday and Thursday for a leadership seminar through Kiewit.
It's a good time to be a female in the construction industry! 
The ConE girls with some JE Dunn females at the JE Dunn Headquarters building right in front of where the Concrete Beam was being lifted into place for the garage.
The Performing Arts Centers. Candice with JE Dunn is talking.
