Isaac (00:10): Hey, what's up everybody? Isaac here, Civil Engineering Academy. Thanks for giving us a listen and a review or a subscribe, whatever you do. We appreciate you jumping on and listening to our show. I'm excited today to bring on Dr. Jennifer Ziegler with her PE as well. She's done a lot of schooling, earned her PhD. She's also the vice president of EWRI, which is the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of ASCE. Well accomplished, heavily involved in public policy as well. And I bring her on to talk about that. I wanted to find out her journey into civil engineering and talk about how we as civil engineers can get more involved in public policy and help shape the future of our country with policies and where dollars are spent as well. So it's a fascinating conversation. She has wonderful stories and I loved hearing about her own journey into civil engineering.

(01:02): So that's all going to be coming up right after this. Can't wait till you check it out. We'll see you in a minute. Hey, I wanted to jump on real quick and let you know about a free resource we developed for you. You can find it at civileengineeringacademy.com/peguide, and this will help you to jumpstart your studies for your PE exam. So if you're in the hunt and you're just thinking about the PE exam, this guide will help you get through the process of figuring out everything you need to do from the PE exams prerequisites that you got to figure out, the must-have materials that you're going to need for the exam, any approved calculators, what groups you should join, exam secrets, and much more. It's all in this guide that we've got developed for you. It's completely free. You can go check it out at civileengineeringacademy.com/peguide.

(01:46): Just put in your email. We'll get you that information as soon as the email comes to your inbox. So go check it out, civilengineeringacademy.com/peguide. All right, we are live and rolling. Jennifer, thank you for joining me on the Civil Engineering Academy podcast. I appreciate you doing this.

Jennifer (02:07): Yeah, thanks for having me.

Isaac (02:09): Yeah, I'm excited to not only get to know you better, but kind of dive into your civil engineering background. In the world of civil engineering, what led you into that path?

Jennifer (02:37): So my dad is actually a construction engineer. Before that was a part of civil engineering, and I've always been around engineering and civil engineering because while my dad is not a civil engineer, he is really close to one, very close to being one. And so a lot of the people that I interacted with as a child or a lot of the people that I interacted with even later in life with my dad and his job, they were civil engineers. It was really interesting to me and I was really interested in what they do. And I went back and forth. Actually, I almost majored in aerospace engineering and in fact almost got postgraduate degrees in aerospace engineering. But I decided that I actually wanted to be a civil engineer, very specifically dealing with water and environment because that's a huge part of what we deal with and what we live with every day and impacting some of those and making some environmental decisions or environmental projects that can make things better was really interesting to me.

(03:44): In fact, I come from a very interesting family because my dad is a construction engineer. My mom, she would now be considered a computer science major. So that was before in the 80s before computer science was actually a thing. My younger sister is also a civil engineer, but she's in traffic and transportation and my husband is an aerospace engineer and my younger sister's husband is a civil engineer. So I actually come from a family surrounded by engineers and a lot of civil engineers. And you can just imagine what our Thanksgiving table hug looks like. We've had multiple conversations, that's a nice word, I guess arguments or disagreements on things that are happening around the town that I grew up in and the positives and negatives and all this other stuff. So just a really boring background story. I grew up around it. It was really interesting to me and that's kind of what I did.

Isaac (04:43): That's amazing though that you have all of that around you. So it's also nice too because you probably have a good support group there probably when you were going through school or trying to take your exams, you could bounce stuff off of everyone around you. So that's nice. I wanted to ask you a little bit about

Jennifer (05:01): Your education. I do remember when I was taking. Oh yeah, sure.

Isaac (05:07): Oh no, go ahead. Sorry, I cut you off there.

Jennifer (05:12): Oh, it's okay. I was going to say I remember when I was taking my PE exam, my sister and I, we bounced materials back and forth because she's a year and a half younger than I am, so we took it around the same time. So we bounced materials back and forth and we shared a lot of study material and every time one of us would come out from an exam, we would call each other and say, "How do you think it went?" And she would call and ask me water and environmental questions. I would call and ask her transportation questions like, "I wasn't really sure how to do this. This is kind of what I did. Is that logical? Does that make sense?" And it was quite nice to have somebody that I could bounce that off of, especially because we don't focus on the same type of civil engineering.

(06:05): We have two different specialties. And so having somebody that you trust, that you respect, that you could really bounce some ideas and approaches off of, especially when studying was really great. It was really great.

Isaac (06:20): Yeah. And I think that's really good advice for anybody taking the exam. If you can find somebody that is in the same boat as you, that's very helpful. So yeah, that would be nice to have. I actually have my own brother, older brother, he also is a civil engineer, heavy into structural engineering. So I kind of did the same thing. I remember doing that, trying to bounce stuff off of my brother. So yeah, great tips there. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your education. Could you describe, I guess, your educational pathway? And I know you earned your PhD. What was the motivation to go from a master's to earning your PhD?

Jennifer (07:05): Yeah, so I can start with the path that I took and then the boring story about my PhD, which is boring, just like my background story. So when I decided I was going to go into civil engineering, I was looking around at different schools and I got into a lot of really top schools and I got a lot of scholarships, but my family had moved to Mississippi when I was younger and my mom was pretty sick at the time when I was going to school. I went to a residential high school called the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. So you physically live on campus your 11th, 12th grade years. My older sister had just moved to Memphis. She's the only non-engineer in the family. She's in business. She runs a multimillion dollar, very successful business in the Memphis area. So she just moved to Memphis, which is about three hours away from where my parents live.

(08:02): My younger sister was moving out of the house at 16 to also go to the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. And when you're there, you can't actually leave campus. You can't just be like, "Oh, mom needs some help or dad's out of town, so I need to go help out and spend the night at home." You can't do that when you go to MSMS. So I was looking around and trying to decide where I wanted to go. And Mississippi State has a really strong engineering program, civil engineering program, and I got a full ride to go to state. And so I decided to go there because it's really close to where my parents live. So it was my older sister three hours away, my younger sister basically unavailable. I wanted to be close to my parents in case they needed any help. And thankfully, the school that's close to where my parents live has a stellar civil engineering program.

(08:56): So that's where I went to school and I got a degree in civil and environmental engineering and I focused on water resources. So all of my classes that I got to choose what to take, they were all water resources because I was very interested in fluid dynamics and fluids and water and all that other stuff. I actually have minors in leadership studies, mathematics and political science as well, because I've always kind of been interested in the crossover between civil engineering and public policy, most specifically how public policy requires. Politics and policy tells us as civil engineers what we have to do in our jobs, what design storm we have to design to, and all these other things. And spoiler alert, there are not a lot of engineers, civil engineers, electrical, mechanical, doesn't matter. There just aren't a lot of engineers that are in the policy space.

(10:04): So a lot of the people who are informing these decisions are people that don't have a background in engineering or science or mathematics. And so I was always been interested in that, so I got a minor in political science. When I was in school, when I was an undergrad, I met the man that I eventually married and he was finishing his PhD in aerospace engineering at Mississippi State at the time. So there was going to be a year from when I finished my undergrad degree and when he finished his PhD that I was going to have. And I didn't really know what to do. And I though, "Well, I'll get a master's degree because you can get that in a year." And my major advisor, Bill McAnally, if you're in the sedimentation or coastal field, you definitely know who Bill is. Bill McAnally said, "Well, Jennifer, if you enroll as a PhD student, we pay you more, but you can just drop out after you get a master's degree." Bill knows me quite well, and I think that was his way of pushing me into a PhD program, knowing that I would do it.

(11:19): When I started my PhD program, I though, "This is quite interesting." My husband finished his PhD. He went direct from his bachelor's to his PhD, and he finished it all in four years. I thought I can do that faster because I'm a very, very competitive person. I wasn't going to get a master's degree. I was just going to go straight from a bachelor's to a PhD because you can do that in engineering. Bill was supportive, everybody was happy. Then my first year of grad school, I actually applied for a pretty prestigious fellowship that would cover the research that I was interested in doing for my PhD dissertation. Every comment that I got back was like, "This is really interesting research, but you don't have any published papers. Where's everything from your master's program?" Challenge. Right. I didn't get the fellowship and I didn't get the funding for my research because apparently it's not very common for engineering programs to allow you to skip your master's degree.

(12:35): There was another fellowship that I wanted to do, which was a policy fellowship, and I talked to multiple people that I knew that had received the fellowship that I respected, and they all said, "Jennifer, you need to get a master's. You're going to have to just show a master's degree." I said, "Okay." So about two weeks before the deadline to even to graduate, I was like, "I'm going to get a master's and then just do it." Actually, that was in September and the deadline was in late October. So my master's advisor, James Martin, so if you do anything with freshwater, you probably know James Martin's name. James Martin was really great, and I actually did a research on very quick research paper. I did a non-thesis master's degree so I could get it done in time because the application for the fellowship I wanted to do was in January, so I had to get a master's in December.

(13:36): So James Martin and I, I wrote a paper on law policy and sociology of sustainable freshwater use in the state of Mississippi, which had nothing to do with my dissertation, except they're both kind of a policy-esque type thing. So that's actually how I got my master's. I wasn't going to get a master's until multiple people said, "You should really get a master's if you want to apply for this fellowship." I got the fellowship and - Nice job. I know. I was excited. And so then about a year later, I finished my PhD, and my PhD was in ecosystem-based management of coastal and marine areas in the Gulf of Mexico. So there's a lot of policy applications to that as well. So kind of born story, I'm just very competitive. I did finish my. I actually got a master's and a PhD in three and a half years, so I was right.

(14:40): I could beat my husband because he took the war.

(14:44): He will never let me live it down. And then after that, when I started working, I really wanted to get more into the coastal realm because a lot of my PhD classes were coastal. That's what I'm really interested in, coastal water, estrine water, how things move. It's just a really dynamic system. I was told by some people that I really admire, "Well, your bachelor's, master's, and PhD, they're all in civil engineering, so you really need a piece of paper that says coastal." While I was working full-time at a consulting firm, I actually went to grad school part-time and got a graduate certificate in coastal engineering from the University of New Orleans that has a full-time. Well, sorry, a fully online program. And that was pre - COVID, and it was one of only two in the country, I think, at the time that had a fully online program because I live about three hours, three and a half hours from the University of New Orleans, and I couldn't drive back and forth two or three times a week for class.

(15:58): That would be insane. But it's a really good program. They've got a lot of really great professors that do really high quality research, and a lot of professors that also work at the Water Institute, which is pretty renowned for some of the research they do at UNO and LSU. So that's kind of just how I got some of my degrees. Kind of boring.

Isaac (16:23): Well, I think it's fascinating because your resume is awesome, so I wanted to ask you about that. So thank you for sharing that. Could you describe what you're doing today? You've got all this background now, this education, you've got it while you've been working some of it, but what are you doing today in terms of your career?

Jennifer (16:47): So today I do business development, which includes looking and seeing what people have out there that you can put, what solicitations are available that you can respond to and responding to them, working with clients who develop ways to address their needs. If they have flooding problems, let's talk about what are some steps we can get to and what are some projects we can get to it to address your needs. And then also working with congressionals sometimes with specific requests for places that need funding. So I didn't work on this, but just as an example is the city of Jackson, Mississippi. I'm sure everybody's heard of the water problems that have happened in the city of Jackson. So really the only way that you can find a hundred plus million dollars to address the infrastructure concerns is really through congressional asks. So I did not work on that and I did not work on the congressional asks, that's just an example of some of the ways that you can do some of that work.

(18:00): I also manage projects. So I'm a senior environmental project manager for Neil Schaefer, which is a mid-size regional firm that's based in Jackson, Mississippi. I work in the headquarters, so I manage projects that are mostly stormwater and environmental projects. So environmental projects can be anything from where you think dirty environmental, which is like a phase one, phase two corrective action plan, that sort of thing, remediation, all the way to stream restoration. So I do stream restoration, coastal restoration, things like that. So our coastal and water groups really overlap at Neil Shaffer, so we do fresh water and salt water and breakish water all kind of at the same go. I do that, and then I also execute on projects. So recently, because a lot of the areas in Mississippi, especially our coastal low lying areas, they have a lot of problems with stormwater management, flooding from stormwater.

(19:06): I've really been recently been doing a lot of stormwater work, and so I've kind of been defacto leading stormwater at Neil Schaefer since I got here. So identifying what projects we're working on, managing those projects, helping usher the projects through. And soon we're going to start working on some additional training for stormwater projects and some other things because we just got some pretty big stormwater contracts that just came through. So we're going to start working on development of skills and professional skills in the company. So that's kind of what I do. It's a little bit all over the place, but I like it. Is there

Isaac (19:50): Been a favorite project that you've worked on within that? Something that's like, "That one was memorable."

Jennifer (19:59): I do have a favorite project, but it is not a company I'm at now. It's the company that I was at before. I designed a one mile long boardwalk over at Estherine Intertidal Zone on the coast of Mississippi. It doesn't seem like all that big of a deal, except number one, it's the largest pier over vegetated marsh in the state. And number two, we use innovative construction methods and materials in order to get it through permitting in an efficient manner, and it also increases the resiliency of the final product. We went over submerge aquatic vegetation habitat. If you do anything in the coastal area, you know if there's SAV, your project is basically dead in the water, except we were able to use some innovative materials to allow light through so that it could be permitted through the core, which was really great. And the same materials also there, instead of using wood as your surface material, we would use a product.

(21:22): We use a product called ThrouhFlow, but there are other products out there. Basically, it's got holes in it that allow water to come up, ADA compliant, it's fine. Yeah, you're actually starting to see it more and more. And so while it lets light through, it also lets water up through it. And so when you have a storm surge, instead of pushing the boards out of place when your water is coming up, the water goes through the material, and so it reduces the upward impact and pressure. And so after a storm surge, it really helps that you don't have to replace the entire product. So we were about 90% through construction and got a direct hit from Hurricane Zeta when it came ashore, the project did, and we were very concerned that we were going to have to redo some of the project. And the construction crews went out a couple of days after Zeta when things had kind of receded and dried out, and they said, "You're never going to believe this.

(22:30): All we need is a leaf blower to blow the dead vegetation off of the pier so that it can be cleaned up and we can just keep right on with construction." Nothing had to be in place. It was pretty great. So that's probably my favorite project. It actually won an E&R award project of merit award for something. I also like the fact that it came in right at budget. It was built during the height of COVID, so I'm pretty proud of the fact that it came in right at budget because COVID prices are wild.

Isaac (23:12): Yeah, they were crazy. And lead times. Well, that sounds like a unique project. Congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you. In addition to all this, you're also EWRI vice president, ASCE. Could you touch on that a little bit, about what you do there? How did you get there, I guess? How did you become a vice president? How did that all work for you? And I don't know, for civil engineers that are on the fence about joining ASCE, what's been the value for you in being part of ASCE as well?

Jennifer (23:50): Yeah, I can definitely touch on that. So interestingly, this all dates back to the fellowship that I talked about that I wanted, that I applied for and that I received. So I was a Dean Johnny Kanaus, Marine Policy Fellow, and I worked on Capitol Hill for US Senator as a civil engineer, advising on energy environments, water, like that. And when I was there, I was the only civil engineer on Capitol Hill. There were a couple of others. There was an industrial one, electrical, two aerospace ones, but I was the only civil. And so I've been involved with ASE a little bit in college, but when I was on the Hill, I would get calls from ASCE's DC office. So they have a lobbying group and they would ask me things, we would talk about things. We'd help identify bills and language that was important to civil engineers and work with them on that.

(25:01): And so I got a little bit involved in the public policy side of ASCE while I was on Capitol Hill. But because of some of the work that I did, I was selected in 2015 as a new face of civil engineering, which is an award that ASCE gives out. There are 10 professionals for, I think it's people that are 30 and under, and there are 10 collegiate awards given out every year. At that time, if you were named a new face of civil engineering, you would go to the ASCE Opal Awards, which it's a huge civil engineering, huge nerdy civil engineering awards show where you recognize projects and leaders in the civil engineering industry. But as a new face, you are actually assigned a mentor. And my mentor happened to be Christina Swallow, who is also very involved in the policy engineering overlap. She was an ASE fellow, policy fellow that worked on Capitol Hill.

(26:14): She used to run the Nevada Department of Transportation. Now she is doing something with sustainability and civil engineering in Arizona. So she was really involved in that. Well, a few years later, she was elected to be the ASE president. And when she's the president, whoever the president is, they actually get to appoint a presidential appointee to the EWI governing board. She chose me. So she said, "I want you to represent me and represent the ASE, the society, to the institute." I was like, "I don't know what I'm doing, but okay, let's do it." When I got there, and I actually served in that position for three years, I really grew to love the staff. I grew to love the things that we do as an institute, the value that we bring to our members, all the work that we're doing for sustainability and resiliency and water and drought and all these other things.

(27:24): I really started to love it. While I'd always been involved on the geographic side, because I live in Mississippi, I've been very involved in Mississippi, I started to become more involved on the technical side, which is where your institutes are, just simply through that appointment.

(27:43): I served in different positions in ASCE EWRI after I rolled off of the governing board, but I've had multiple people say, "You're young, you have a lot of great ideas, you're in consulting, which is pretty unusual for somebody to be involved in EWI. Would you ever consider running for vice president?" And so eventually my husband and I talked about it, my boss at the time and I talked about it and we said, "Sure, why not?" And so I ran last year and I was elected vice president, which is actually a four-year term because you are vice president, and so I'll become president elect in October, and then the October after that I'll become president, and then the October after that I'll become past president. So it's a four-year commitment, which I knew going into it. EWI has fantastic staff, which is very, very, very, very useful when you are serving in one of these roles because there's a lot of decisions that has to be made.

(28:42): There's a lot of day-to-day things that go on. There's a lot of things to oversee. We host multiple different conferences. We host a international congress. We have lots of things going on, policies, development of new technical literature, things like that. And so having great staff is phenomenal. If we didn't have great staff, I would not have run for the position because I used to run the Mississippi section. I was the president of the Mississippi section, and we don't have staff because we don't have a lot of money. I know how hard it is to run something and not have staff. So we have staff and they're fantastic and they do the majority of the work. Sometimes I feel like I'm just there to say what they tell me to say and wave in who I'm told to wave at. But no, we make a lot of decisions about where things go, the governing board does.

Isaac (29:42): That's

Jennifer (29:42): Great. That a very long story about how I'm involved in EWI, but sorry about that.

Isaac (29:46): No, that's great to know. Well, I think it all ties into what I kind of want to ask about public policy and such and how engineers can get more involved with that, but maybe you could just Briefly touch on why an engineer would find value being part of ASCE from your vantage point.

Jennifer (30:09): Yeah, there's multiple reasons why I think that you as a civil engineer would benefit from being a member of ASCE. The first is the network that you build being involved in ASE. So your local branches and sections will host events. You can go to them, you can get PDH hours, which is always fantastic as a licensed professional engineer because you need those to keep up with everything. And so you can get those PDHs, but you also establish relationships with the professionals where you live. Even if you've been in the industry for a while, people come and go. And so establishing and maintaining those relationships is really, really key to being able to do your job, especially for me as a consultant, because it helps me who am I going to partner with? Who are we going to compete against too? Things like that. Number two, if you get involved above the section level to the region or the institute, then you start creating those relationships that are in places that are not where you are at, which is also fantastic.

(31:22): Two weeks ago, I got on a call with somebody that I didn't know and he said, "Oh yeah, I invited Sam and Troy because they know you." They know me because of EWI. They're in Texas and we are not in the same section because they're in Texas, I'm in Mississippi, but we're in the institute together and that's how we know the work. And we have built that trust because I know the type of work they do, they know the type of work I do, and it was easy to talk to people that you trust at another company. And then there's also online courses that you can take, certificates that you can earn through ASCE. So I talked about my coastal engineering certificate. Well, now ASCE actually has their own certificate program. So if you're interested in Ports and Harbors, have a Port and Harbor certificate that you can earn over about two years.

(32:17): So that can help move your career forward. They've got study materials for the PE and the FE. I think they might have study materials for the structural exam, but don't hold me to that. I'm not a structural engineer. Mississippi doesn't have an SE license, so I don't know. And there's also a lot of possibility to interact with students and younger members who are coming into the profession. It's always so rewarding to work with students and see them enter the profession and grow as well. And then ASCE does provide a pretty substantial platform if you want to become involved in public policy advocacy. So they do provide that as well. So to me, there's a lot of reasons that you should be involved at ASE. It's really about career progression and finding ways that you can build your skills to move your career forward, because a lot of young people, they don't have the ability in their companies or where they work to really build some of those leadership skills until later.

(33:23): ASE gives you that opportunity when you're younger, and that really helps with your career progression.

Isaac (33:31): That's awesome. Great tips, great advice. If you're sitting on the fence, it sounds like a great place to be. I wanted to dive in maybe as we conclude a little bit, but we talked a little bit about public policy and I'm really interested in getting your thoughts as to where those gaps are. Where can civil engineers do a better job of being involved with public policy? What issues do you see that they can be a part of and help?

Jennifer (34:01): Well, basically everywhere, to answer your question, everything. What is the thing? Everything, everywhere, all at once, something like that, the name of the movie. That's it, in my opinion. Every discipline in civil engineering is going to have different needs and they're going to have different gaps. What we need in water resources is different than what somebody needs in transportation or structures. And so it's really going to look different for the different subgroups of civil engineering. But overall, you can look at it like we know that there are funding gaps in our infrastructure across the board, lobbying for infrastructure investment, continued infrastructure investment. IIJA was a great shot in the arm, but it does not address decades of underinvestment in our nation's infrastructure and it does not fill the gap either.

(35:10): Even with all the other funding mechanisms that have happened in the past couple of years, we still have a gap across every single discipline in civil engineering. Policies and rules and laws that we have to follow for design and implementation of what we're doing is extremely important. So yesterday I was at a talk about Buy America Build America, BABA, and how BABA is basically impacting everything that we do in civil engineering, very specifically in water because you're looking at pumps and lines and all these other things. And now you have to buy those materials from America, which is fine, except it's drastically increasing the price of projects. So when you come across things like BABA that say, now you have to do X, and we know the implications of doing X, well, being involved in crafting that legislation and crafting those rules and those laws is extremely important, or at least making your voice known is extremely important because people that don't work in our industry, they don't understand how the decisions that they're making that they're forcing us to do in our everyday work is impacting our abilities to do our job or our ability to deliver products on a budget or on a schedule.

(36:52): BABA is really impacting schedules really across the board. So thankfully there's a stipulation in BABA, there's different things. If it's going to cost more than X percent of what it would without BABA, then you can get waivers and if it's going to drastically impact your timeline, you can get waivers. So there are some things that have been put into place that are going to help, but if people that don't understand the industry and don't understand how we deliver products are not involved in crafting that legislation or those rules, then it can really drastically impact what's happening and what we do every day. Another one that's coming down from on the water side is after the Sackett ruling, Sackett versus US EPA, the change of the definition of waters of the US, we're still waiting to see the guidance that's going to come out of EPA.

(37:51): That's going to drastically impact how we work as professionals and environmental engineers, and it's going to impact projects across the board. So having people that experience this and deal with this is extremely important. ASCE and other professional organizations like NSPE and WTS and the list can go on and on. They all have arms that they lobby for specific policies and they are very active. When you get a new proposed rule that comes out, ASCE will sit down with their experts and they'll say, "Okay, let's review the rule as the civil engineering profession or as the society, let's respond to this and let's talk about what we support, what we don't support, what we would change." And it's really made a difference actually. A lot of people don't see it because they're not involved on the policy side, but it's really made a difference. A lot of people get a little nervous when you start talking about being involved in policy and talking to your lawmakers and other things.

(39:07): If you're nervous about it, you can do it on your local level or you can do it at your state level. There are a lot of states that have civil engineering drive-ins or fly-ins where you can go and you can tell your state representatives, "This is what's important to us." An instance of that is some of the states across the US are trying to get rid of the requirement for licensure. And obviously I think that licensure - Kind

Isaac (39:35): Of pull it all together with other licenses and you're like, "Well, someone that cuts hair is not the same."

Jennifer (39:43): It's not the same. So I think that it's important that we protect licensure and you can get involved with your local groups writing letters, sending emails, talking to your state and local representatives that are going to vote on these issues in your state houses. There's lots of ways. Thankfully, ASCE actually has, if you're interested in policy or think you might be interested in policy, they have policy committees that deal with individual pieces. There's a transportation policy committee. I actually chair the energy, environment, and water policy committee for ASCE. So there's different ones and you can be involved in that. You can just be involved in the ASE fly-in that comes in and they have training. They actually have training where they say, "You've never done this before. Let me tell you what we're asking for as the society, and let me tell you how to talk to your lawmakers." So they don't just say, "Okay, bye, have a good talk." They actually train you on how to do that.

(40:55): And it's really, really, really important because the decisions that these people are making, the decisions that our lawmakers are making directly impact what we do every single day.

Isaac (41:07): Yeah. Well, I think those are great tips. Someone that's just working their daily job and in their cubicle as a civil engineer or whatnot, how can they get involved? And it sounds like just getting training from ASCE and getting plugged in that way is an avenue for you to take part in more public policy. So that's great advice. Well, this has been fun. There's so much information here to unpack. Lots of different things, lots of different moving pieces. I know you're very busy, Jennifer, but I'm hoping that our listeners at the end of the day have a desire to take part in public policy, take part in the resources that ASE has provided, and get their bachelor's degree in three years instead of three and a half.

Jennifer (42:01): No. It's really hard. It's really hard to do

Isaac (42:05): That. It is very hard. I think I was probably double that. Well, Jennifer, thank you for jumping on and sharing this. Is there anything else you would like to share with our group or even a best contact if people had questions about anything we've talked about today?

Jennifer (42:23): Yeah. So I'm always here if people have questions. The best way to reach me is actually going to be through LinkedIn. So you can just search me through LinkedIn and you can find me. And I happily respond to messages unless you're trying to sell me something, which point I don't respond or I slightly decline. So that's really the best way to reach me. So if you're interested in anything that I've talked about or if you want to learn more about anything, I'm happy to help. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. The biggest thing that I would like to leave is civil engineering is hard and school is hard. Don't give up. Never ever quit on a hard day. Never quit on a hard day. And you're stronger than you think you are. You can get through it. Trust me, you can get through it.

(43:21): Take your FE as early as you can. Take your PE as early as you can. Licensure is important and I strongly support licensure. So if you are even on the fence about licensure, you don't have to stamp anything. You never have to stamp anything, but I think licensure is extremely important.

Isaac (43:41): Totally agree. Great advice. Great tips. Jennifer, thank you for doing this and we'll make sure we linked in your profile in our show notes, but thank you for doing this. I hope you have a great weekend.

Jennifer (43:53): Thanks. I hope you have a great weekend too.

Isaac (43:55): All right. See you.