Naod Araya
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Lindsey Asbury, Associate, Environmental Engineering, Brown and Caldwell, San Diego (32.7° N, 117.1° W)

First of her family to graduate from college, Lindsey went on to establish a successful career in environmental engineering.

Lindsey Asbury is an environmental engineer at Brown and Caldwell, where her responsibilities include regulatory compliance research and technical report preparation. She graduated from Rice University in 2010 with a BS in civil and environmental engineering. While at Rice, she participated in Engineers Without Borders and Rice Society of Women Engineers. During our interview, I had the great pleasure of discussing what Lindsey’s current career entails and the many factors that led her to this particular field.  

Lindsey grew up in Brownsville, Texas and was the first of her family to pursue higher education. She had an innate drive to work toward a goal that was largely abstract. When she made it to Rice, she experienced an intense culture shock. Under the guidance of mentors, however, she soon learned how to navigate Rice in all its cultural complexities. When it came time to conceptualize her career trajectory, financial practicality was front and center. The goal was an intellectually stimulating yet financially rewarding career. This is a common sentiment shared by many first-generation college students seeking to liberate themselves from the same financial burdens as their parents. Graduating during the Great Recession was further motivation to choose practicality. And the results showed as she “made almost more with [her] first job out of college than [her] mom had made working 20-odd years.”

As an environmental engineer at a national firm, Lindsey works very closely with clients to guide them through the complicated and confusing world of environmental compliance. Initially she only valued the more technical side and avoided management or sales. She has now transitioned into project management, however, which entails the organization and management of the resources that are necessary to complete the full project. Part of the job involves fieldwork, allowing her to “go out and get away from the keyboard.” She explained that refined time management was an important skill for her position that she had to learn on the job.

Climate change is one of the biggest hurdles Lindsey’s industry is facing currently. Her office has an internal group studying the effects climate change might have on water availability since many of their municipal clientele have concerns on the declining flows into wastewater treatment plants in California. Furthermore, since changes in environmental regulation laws have cascading impacts on how their clients must report, environmental engineers will be at the forefront of any coming environmental political overhaul. If you think you may value working in an industry that is seeking to be equipped to face the challenges of infrastructure in a changing climate, then a career in environmental engineering might be for you.

Luckily, young professionals at Lindsey’s firm have the opportunity to be part of a comprehensive near-peer mentoring program. She is a proud mentor, helping guide those who are just starting their career paths. She mentioned some great advice: it is never too early to start mentoring others. You already have a certain wisdom that can really benefit someone; seek them out and share it. This interview with Lindsey provides a unique opportunity for first-generation students like me to see one of the many paths that we can take for ourselves.

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstance create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up, and did you adhere to or stray from that? How that has shaped you into who you are now?

That’s such a good question. I was a first-generation college student, so my mom and my stepfather, my grandmother, none of them went to college. The expectation for me was that [college] wasn’t necessary. But I was pretty stubborn about it. I definitely wanted to go to college, and I wanted to do engineering. Both were just out of left field for my family.

I think that I was really fortunate to be given great mentorship by teachers in my high school, both in the sciences and the humanities. Then, when I got to college, being able to work closely with professors in the civil engineering department meant I was supported enough that I made it through.

Navigating Rice as a first-generation college student was an interesting experience. My family was middle class. We were from Brownsville. We didn’t have a ton of money, and just being put into the stratum where, oh, now I get to go to the opera for free and the symphony for free is just a different world. It also meant I was by myself through financial concerns, figuring out how to do FAFSA, how to apply for grants, loans and all that. 

Having grown up with that background, there are dual responsibilities I feel – the responsibility to give back to my family due to the sacrifices they’ve made, and the responsibility to pay forward the support and opportunity I received as I worked towards my college and career goals.

I’m also first-gen, so it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. I feel like it’s really hard for first-gens to conceptualize what they want their career path to be, because I think it’s easy to conceptualize academia and academics because it’s really straightforward, but when you don’t have parents who are also white collar, it’s really hard to think about career. How did you navigate the whole career search and things like that?

To be honest, I always feel like I’m still working on that. I felt like as a first-generation college student, my primary concerns were really practical: make sure you get a good career that will provide, that’s intellectually stimulating, [so you do] not have to worry about paying the bills or those type of concerns that maybe second-gen—people whose parents just have that expectation that they just need to go to college, get a great job—don’t have. The first year that I was out of Rice, it was soon after the 2008 recession, so we were still feeling effects of that in terms of salary offers. Even at that point, I still made almost more with my first job out of college than my mom had made working 20 odd years, which is really humbling. But after I did that, I felt like that’s it, I’ve made it, and I didn’t really think immediately about my career path.

It took me a couple years of trying to figure out what are my strengths, what do I want to do, what do I get satisfaction out of. They don’t cover that in college. I get a lot of satisfaction from bringing community and a sense of connection across our company, so I’m part of what’s called a rising professionals group, for people just starting out their career paths. We share information; we talk about our concerns from our perspective.

What do you do when you feel like you’ve made it? Did you envision yourself where you are right now 10 years ago?

I had no idea where I was going to be in 10 years. I thought, okay, I’m going to do some engineering, and after that I’ll do engineering that’s a little bit more difficult. I actually resisted the idea of management and sales because I thought I wanted to be on a purely technical path and  tried not to get anything other than technical assignments. But the truth is, in engineering, there’s a lot of management involved and having that skill is really valuable. And now that I’ve started doing project management, I find that I actually like it.

What are some skills that you’ve had to learn with project management that you didn’t learn in college?

I would say more refined time management. In college, you have your problem set, it has to be done by a certain date, and the due date is very hard. With some of these projects, a client might be amenable to having a due date pushed out, or you might find something that needs to be addressed that wasn’t accounted for. So, you have to bring that up and explain the pluses and minuses. It can be a lot more fluid, where you start a project and as it goes through development, there are more things that come up that change the direction of where you’re headed versus having something that has a very defined end.

You mentioned earlier that you’ve been mentored a lot at Rice, even beyond Rice, and that really helped shape who you’ve become. Do you think you’ve engaged in that mentoring as a young professional, now that you’re 10 years out?

I try to connect with people and share what I have. It’s funny, because at any point in my career, I always feel like, well, I don’t know that much, what wisdom do I have to pass on? But you slowly accrue it and before you realize it, you’re far down the road and you’re like, huh, I guess I did do more than I thought.

What led to your current position? What does your position entail, and what do you do on a daily basis?

A lot of the project work that I do is compliance based. We’re offering services to our clients like transactional services, environmental site assessments in support of real estate transactions. We do stormwater compliance; that is one of my focuses. In California, we have a couple of general permits, the industrial general permit and construction general permit. And those require monitoring, sampling, reporting. We help our clients manage all that because the permit document is very large and complex. If it’s not their main responsibility, they have to do this work in addition to the operations of a plant or factory. That is usually when they’ll call us and say “I need a little bit of guidance.”

Could you give a brief example of the kind of projects?

I would say a typical project is for private sector clients, we will go out to a facility and audit their operations. We do that across various market sectors—retail, mining, or manufacturing. We will go in and create a report of their environmental responsibilities or obligations, saying for this permit, they need to do this.

Would you say a lot of your job involves a lot of fieldwork?

Yes and no. Certain business lines require more fieldwork than others. If you’re on a remediation project, then you have to be out there on the site, conducting confirmation sampling or overseeing the work as the eyes and ears of our client. If you work in compliance, a lot of it is paperwork based, because there’s a lot of forms and reporting that has to happen. It’s a good balance. I feel like I don’t spend every day out of the office, but I don’t spend every day in the office.

What aspects of your company culture make it stand out as a great place to work?

What I really enjoy about my company, and part of the reason why I’ve stayed here instead of moving somewhere else, is that I feel like the company culture is such that I feel like I have a lot of growth potential. It really encourages honesty and interaction. One thing that is somewhat unique about my company is that it’s privately owned, meaning that we have a board of directors, but they don’t have majority stake in our company. Our company stock is divided more or less evenly between all the employees so that no one person could sell the company. It means that they’re really invested in making sure that we feel like our growth trajectory as a company is connected to the work that we do here. If we have a particularly good year, then we get a dividend from our profits and the rest goes into employee professional development, business development, finding ways to make our business more efficient. For example, investments in technology and software, sending people to conferences or getting them training or certifications that would end up getting us more work.

How do environmental regulations shape the industry?

It has a really big impact on it. We do constantly monitor for any changes to environmental regulation. Off the top of my head right now, there are pending changes to the general industrial permit for California stormwater, which will have a lot of cascading impacts on our clients. So that’s one thing that we’re constantly monitoring to be able to tell our clients, “Hey, this is coming. This is going to affect your operations.”

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry?

It’s pretty difficult to say, but I feel like probably one that we have very little control over is climate change. It’s a massive concern, and we already are trying to plan for any changes that occur as a result of climate change. We even have several internal groups and projects to identify and share resources on effects climate change has on water availability, quality, drainage system effectiveness and other project components. What happens if I have declining flows in a wastewater treatment plant because the rains, the fluctuations in our climate, are a lot more extreme? In California, we’re having periods of drought followed by periods of extreme rain. Would that cause the operation to be a lot different than if you have more consistent water supply? Those are things that a lot of our clients are trying to anticipate ahead of their effects.

What would you say to anyone that is interested in going into your field?

I would say my biggest advice is to just take more risks once you get to the workplace. Ask for more responsibility. Leadership wants to have people to take on more work, because allowing someone junior to take on more responsibility frees them to do other work. A company should want to progress its engineers down this pipeline of leadership. I felt when I first started, I was still learning the ropes; I thought I have to be 100 percent on this knowledge before I can move onto the next thing. And that’s not necessarily true. You can learn multiple things, take on multiple roles, at the same time. I think trying as many things as you can, broadening your experience when you’re younger and people are willing to teach you new things, is really important. Once you reach mid-level, you have these competencies and expertise that lends people to want to give you more of the same type of work, and it’s harder to break out and explore once you’re mid-level or senior level because it costs more on a project basis. And it’s risky. Since we’re at consulting, we have different projects going on all the time. You might have to change jobs to get that broadening of your horizons that you’re looking for, but there’s really no better time than when you’re at the beginning of your career.

Do you feel like you could do that broadening while you’re still in college?

Yeah, definitely. There are internships and research for getting familiarized with different aspects of your field. If there’s a market that you want to work in, getting familiar with which agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or professional organizations support your interests and initiatives is really important. Get in touch with those people to start your network while you’re still in college.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.