Many students graduate from the University with dreams of one day giving back to the school, once careers have developed or resources are available. Since I graduated two years ago, I’ve seen how my entry-level engineering job in Charlottesville has offered me such an opportunity immediately, before I ever expected it.

As a fourth-year civil engineering student in the spring of 2008, I spent a few late nights at the Thornton Hall computer lab. I would park in the small parking lot adjacent to Olsson, and shuffle down Engineer’s Way to the lab to plug away at my thesis. Engineering and non-engineering alumni alike can no doubt remember the smattering of engineering students like myself that often parked in this Olsson lot en route to late-night work.

Only months later, though—and unbeknownst to me then—that very parking lot would be replaced with the Engineering School’s latest expansion project, Rice Hall.

I eventually finished my thesis, graduated and, in August 2008, I sought and was offered a job with Pinnacle Engineering, a structural consulting firm located down Ivy Road, only a short mile from Grounds. I soon found myself driving along the Corner and past the Rotunda on my way to work—still in close proximity to the University so near and dear to my heart, but no longer directly involved with it.

A couple months into my employment, however, our firm began design work on two major U.Va. building projects, the College’s Physical & Life Sciences Research Building and the Engineering School’s Rice Hall. I was once again involved with the University—moreover, able to give something back to U.Va.—as a member of the Pinnacle Engineering project team that would design these two new building structures, the latter to replace that same Olsson parking lot with a prominent new six-story landmark.

Over the next two years, design and construction progressed quickly. I learned much from my design team at Pinnacle, and put my hands to the design work. The opportunity to give back to the Engineering School in such a tangible way—using the very skills it taught me to design its new building—felt almost surreal, and I often walked down Whitehead Road, past the construction sites, just to take in the weight of what was happening. Football and basketball seasons came and went, record snow dumped on Charlottesville and the buildings continued growing. This past spring, the superstructure of each building was completed, giving final shape to this transformation.

Among young, entry-level engineers like myself, I don’t expect that opportunities to work on prominent projects like these are very common. In fact, for professionals with all levels of experience, the opportunity to use career skills toward a major project at one’s alma mater seems rare indeed, and I am exceedingly grateful for such a chance.
As it happened, though, I had stepped into my post-student life in Charlottesville very unsure of my career goals or life plan. Almost all my college friends had moved on to bigger cities, jobs, or studies, and as I drove to work past the familiar Rotunda each morning, I often asked myself if I too should have moved away, if better options lay elsewhere, if I was actually losing out on something. I worried my stay in Charlottesville would only be a time of waiting for a greater adventure to present itself.

While I waited and as I worked, though, this career opportunity soon fell into my lap; I never set out for such a project, but it came about nonetheless, and to me—just a young man still searching for his tracks. Indeed, as I now look back on the past couple years, it seems that this opportunity, as with much of life, was most abundantly found not through my own searches, plans and expectations for my future, but when those very notions were instead abandoned, even lost themselves.

The author wishes to acknowledge his employer and friend at Pinnacle Engineering, Keith Rittenhouse (Engr ’71, ’75). Worlds of thanks.

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