What It Takes to be a Female DPU Engineer

Susan Hamilton attended a career fair when she was 13 and identified with a vendor there. “He looked like me. He was a civil engineer and built bridges.”

They talked about the requirements for becoming an engineer and he told her she could be “a trail blazer and a role model,” she remembers. There were bridges where she lived in California and she enjoyed math, so she decided to make bridge-building her career.

“That changed when I took a structures class later in school. My interests changed to soils and subsurface construction.”

The greatest obstacle for her was resuming her education after a long break. “I left school in my junior year to travel with my husband, who was in the Army, and I didn’t return to school for 11 years. Then I enrolled in civil engineering and had to retake calculus. I didn’t mind being older than some of the other students. There were other non-traditional students there.”

Her first job after graduation was as a water and sewer utility engineer. “I had a great boss and mentor who taught me what I needed to know to be successful. I now have confidence not to be afraid to ask about what I don’t know, and to share what I do know with others. My professional motto is ‘Leave a community, neighborhood, or project area in better condition than you found it.’”
 
Hamilton is operations manager for Sewer and Stormwater Capital Improvement Projects. 

Janice Bailey’s mother left school early to get married, so she told her children they were definitely finishing college. “I came from a family of teachers. My mother always said, ‘I don’t care how you do it as long as you do the best you can!’”

So she enrolled in Upward Bound, a federally funded educational program, and researched careers. “Engineering had math and science, which I loved. My grandfather was a home builder, including the family home where I was born. I decided to follow in my grandparents’ footsteps and major in engineering.”

She worked numerous side jobs unrelated to engineering, constantly looking for engineering internships. “It’s a competitive and diverse field,” she says, and school was more theory than application. She wanted the hands-on experience.
Finally, she got her start in a large engineering shop designing ship components. “My commute was an hour or longer each way, so I was thinking of trying home renovating, but then I started working in the utility field and that’s become my career.”

Bailey is operations manager for Enterprise Asset Management.

Rosemary Green’s father was an electrical engineer, and she also wanted a “solid career” where she would always be able to support herself.
 
“I was interested in what I could see and touch, understanding why a wall stood and did not fall, or how a roadway was constructed from different points and met accurately in the middle. I was considering architecture, but decided I wasn’t creative enough.”

Her older sister suggested she apply for college as a liberal arts major and then switch majors once she was accepted, so she did and immediately transferred to engineering.
 
“The classes were hard, so you had to plug away day by day. My first roommate was applying to veterinary school, so she was always studying, too.”
 
Green has 10 siblings, so helping with school expenses was another consideration. “I signed up for the co-op program which solidified that I was on the right career path. I really liked being around construction and people who were solving problems.”

Eager to start her career now, she was pleasantly surprised to find companies were eager to hire female engineers. “I was getting two or three interviews for every one that my male classmates were getting.

“I was given many opportunities, first in engineering and construction for power stations, then in field offices for power distribution groups. I hit the industry at the right time, following advances made by women before me and men who wanted to see women succeed in the field.”

Green is a deputy director and supervises water treatment and distribution, wastewater treatment, engineering services and capital improvement projects.

Amanda Bickel was always interested in how things worked and how they were built. Acquiring her civil engineering degree was her goal. “I was working full-time as a land surveyor and taking evening classes. As a woman and new to engineering, it was initially a challenge as I was not always taken seriously in this field and struggled to find positions where you can have an opinion in the decision-making process.”

Bickel has been with the city three years and is an engineer in gas distribution where she supports design, planning, construction, operation and maintenance.

Surani Olsen chose environmental engineering because she wanted to solve pollution problems. “Because of the visible environmental pollution around Indonesia where I grew up – emissions from buses, cars, and river pollution – I felt clean air, clean water and a clean living environment were our basic needs.”

Her biggest challenge was completing her undergraduate research project at the same time she was working as a tutor to pay for her tuition. Finding an entry level environmental engineering job was the next challenge, as well as passing the professional engineer licensing exams.

Olsen is a project management analyst in Stormwater.

Jennifer Hatchett enjoyed math in high school and loved solving complex problems. “My dad’s friend was an engineer in the wastewater industry and I got interested in engineering talking to him. I interned for him one summer during college.”

Engineering school was a challenge. “There were times I really thought, this is too hard!” she remembered. None of her friends were in engineering, so she had to stay focused. “I was with mostly males in school, which was sometimes daunting. And that was the same issue when I started working. There weren’t many women in the places I worked.”

Hatchett was a project and area manager for a global engineering company, before coming to DPU where she oversees stormwater and wastewater collections.

Sarah Deitz wanted to become an environmental engineer to “apply environmental concepts to improve surrounding communities. I always enjoyed science, and this was a way to apply it in a positive way.” Her biggest challenge was creating a network of mentors in the engineering field. “Having a supportive network is priceless,” she says. A recent hire at DPU, Deitz is an engineer in water resources.

(left) Rosemary Green (top row) Amanda Bickel, Janice Bailey, Susan Hamilton (bottom) Jennifer Hatchett, Sarah Deitz, Surani Olsen