Professional development seminar with Emily Schwartz

Emily Schwartz
Project Engineer
Black & Veatch

Abstract

As a young engineering consultant in the dams and levees sector Schwartz will share her personal career path and the perspective it provides her 10 years into her career. This will begin with a brief personal history of her time with a series of diverse firms: Rizzo Associates, Freese and Nichols, HDR, and Black & Veatch. In addition to distinctions in company culture and approach, she’ll provide an overview of her own project work, the evolution of that work as her career has advanced, and highlights from her unique field experiences such as building a dam in Australia, managing a materials testing lab in Panama, and climbing bridges in the US. She’ll also provide a brief history of the dams industry, discussing both its decline and recent resurgence.
 
Shifting gears to the broader topic of professional development, Schwartz will discuss the tactics, both successful and not, which she's employed to grow her career and “promote a personal brand” within the small and tightknit dams industry. Particularly she’ll focus on the three things she's found to be most important in the first five years of a career: field work, advocates, and professional organizations. She’ll also touch on some important issues that don’t often come up when approaching a technical career path, including but not limited to:

• Leaving the CMU bubble
• Weathering the workforce before, during, and after a recession (it could happen again)
• How to find that next job. Spoiler: it’s a lot like dating
• The impact of non-technical skills on career advancement
• How much company culture matters to the individual

Bio

Emily Schwartz, PE, is a dam design and inspection engineer based in Austin, TX. She presently works within Black & Veatch’s geotechnically focused Heavy Civil Group, concentrating on risk assessment, RCC dam design, and asset management. She is also growing both the group’s Texas dams program and its nationwide industrial rope access inspection program. In her nearly 11 years in private consulting, Schwartz has worked on water control, power generation, and transportation projects across the U.S. and abroad. Her work has taken her from the Panama Canal—overseeing material testing on the recently completed third locks expansion—to the top of the Calatrava-design Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge 400-ft above Dallas, and many unexpected places between.

For the last 7 years, Schwartz has enjoyed a steadily expanding role within the US Society on Dams (USSD). She is a founding member of the Young Professionals (YP) Committee where she presently serves as Vice Chair. She is also an active member of the Concrete Dams, Public Safety, and annual Conference Planning committees. As part of USSD’s YP leadership team, she has spearheaded a cultivation of YP participation throughout the organization and is now guiding other industry organizations, including the Association State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) and the National Hydropower Association (NHA), on the growth of YP-oriented initiatives.  

Schwartz is a licensed civil engineer in Texas, an NHI certified bridge inspector, and a SPRAT certified industrial rope access technician with nearly 200 hours of on-rope inspection to date. She obtained both her Bachelor's and Master's in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 2007 and 2011, respectively.

In her spare time, Schwartz is training as a certified therapeutic horseback riding (hippotherapy) instructor at Healing with Horses Ranch in Manor, TX.