NSBE’s Steve Earl
Building for Home and Community
By Phaedra Brotherton
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NSBE member Steve Earl of Turner Construction Company is a superintendent on the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital construction project in Virginia.
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Steve Earl of Chester, Pa., first became interested in civil engineering in high school, after hearing a professor from Widener University talk about how civil engineers could build buildings and other structures. That sparked an interest in him, he says, because he came from a “broke down” city and was interested in the idea of helping rebuild it. Because he was from a military family, he was also intrigued by the notion of building his own home.
“When I (was growing) up, my family was always on the move, in a different apartment. We never had a house. Dad was in the Navy, so we always had to travel,” says Earl. “When I got older, I wanted to be in a profession to build my own house, build buildings and restructure cities. I wanted to go further into civil engineering and get into city planning. I’m still thinking about that as an option of something I want to do.”
For now, Earl has an impressive track record, big responsibilities and a promising future as a field engineer for Turner Construction Company, where he’s worked for the past six years. He’s now working on what he calls “the biggest project of my career”: the construction of Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, in Virginia. The $807-million, 1.3 million-square-foot facility will take over some of the services now being offered at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. That center is being closed as part of the 2005 Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC).
Long Journey
Earl’s path to civil engineering was not a straight line. He admits that his first love is math and that he originally saw himself as a math teacher. But once he found out the pay scale for that career, he decided to give engineering a look.
Earning his civil engineering degree from Temple University took longer than he’d planned because of a bout of meningitis when he was 19 and the need to take time off to earn money for college fees. But he gained valuable experience at the school with internships as a CAD draftsman/designer and a field engineer-construction management estimator. He also worked as a building engineer/computer technician. Earl graduated from Temple in 2004.
During college, he was also active with NSBE as chapter treasurer and as coordinator for the Pre-College Initiative program, which encourages black students in middle school and high school to attend college and pursue engineering degrees. While attending the NSBE Career Fair at the Annual Convention in Anaheim in 2003, he met a recruiter from Parsons Brinckerhoff. A year later, when he was about to graduate, he attended the NSBE Annual Convention in Dallas and met with the same representative. He eventually interviewed with the company, which is based in Herndon, Va., and landed a job as a civil engineer to work on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project. A year later, he joined Turner Construction.
Knowledge, Relationships
Earl says he values the things he’s learned during the Fort Belvoir project, including the chance to work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He says the project has been fun for him because of the relationships he’s developed and the team atmosphere.
His advice for others interested in civil engineering is to get as much experience and learn as much as they can in their jobs.
Build good professional relationships, he adds: “That’s major. I see a lot of guys that don’t make it because (employers) didn’t like their attitudes.”
He also recommends taking the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam, so “you have some clout behind you,” and getting Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification, which deals with green building requirements.
“(LEED) is the way of the world right now,” Earl says. “That’s the program that’s getting people to think differently about how we build and how we design.”
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