The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008
The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008
The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008
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First UAA graduates earn four-year<br />
construction management degree<br />
BY TRACY KALYTIAK<br />
S even<br />
years ago, Lynnette Warren was driving south on Old<br />
Seward Highway near O’Malley when a truck suddenly<br />
slammed into the right front side of her Nissan Sentra.<br />
“My grandmother was visiting from Idaho,” Warren said.<br />
“We were going to pick up some shampoo stuff for her hair<br />
and get some lunch. He pulled out from the Mapco station<br />
without making sure no one was coming.”<br />
Her grandmother wasn’t injured, but Warren felt excruciating<br />
pain after the adrenaline from the experience subsided.<br />
<strong>The</strong> crash had damaged discs in her back and neck.<br />
Warren was a 12-year journeyman carpenter who had<br />
done everything from installing metal studs to welding to<br />
pouring concrete to finish work. Six days a week, 10 to 12<br />
hours a day, she routinely did things like hoisting and muscling<br />
12-foot, 5/8-inch sheets of Sheetrock that weighed<br />
more than 100 pounds.<br />
That crash injury ended Warren’s career, but set her on an<br />
academic trajectory that ended with a job orchestrating the<br />
intricate Glenn Highway widening project in Anchorage.<br />
In May, Warren became one of the first four people – and<br />
the only woman, so far – to receive a Bachelor of Science<br />
degree in the University of <strong>Alaska</strong> Anchorage fledgling construction<br />
management program.<br />
UAA’s construction management program is in its fourth<br />
year, and more than 100 students have chosen it as a major,<br />
said Jeff Callahan, director of UAA’s CM department.<br />
<strong>The</strong> program offered associate-level courses until February<br />
2007, when UA’s board of regents approved the expansion<br />
of the two-year CM program into a four-year Bachelor<br />
of Science program.<br />
Construction management students can tackle a variety<br />
of jobs – construction foreman to construction management,<br />
cost estimators, project superintendents, field engineers, assistant<br />
field engineers, working in government agencies,<br />
Callahan said.<br />
Warren, 43, is a project engineer with CIRI-affiliated<br />
<strong>Alaska</strong> Interstate Construction.<br />
She accepted that position in March 2007, after twice<br />
serving the company as an intern while earning her construction<br />
management degree.<br />
“I did the Tok road reconstruction in the summer of<br />
2006,” Warren said of her first internship. “I’ve done the Eureka<br />
paving from Miles 118 to 127. On each of those I was<br />
project engineer.”<br />
Warren worked on the first phase of the Port of Anchorage<br />
expansion and will oversee the resurfacing of Merrill<br />
Field this summer in addition to organizing the widening of<br />
the Glenn Highway.<br />
Lynnette Warren, a project engineer for AIC, was the first woman to<br />
graduate from UAA’s new construction management bachelor’s degree<br />
program in May.<br />
“It’s called multi-tasking,” Warren laughed. “We have<br />
two engineers on the Glenn project because it’s so massive.<br />
It’s a big deal; we want to make sure we cover our bases.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> crux of the $14-million Glenn project, Warren says,<br />
is eliminating the bottleneck where the highway splits into<br />
Fifth and Sixth avenues and creating three lanes east and<br />
west all the way through.<br />
“It’s a big project,” she said. “<strong>The</strong>re’s lots of traffic. We<br />
hope people will be nice to us. Keep in mind that at the end<br />
it’s going to be better.”<br />
Warren’s career in the construction industry began when<br />
she was 27 years old, after she applied for and earned admission<br />
into a carpenter’s training apprenticeship program.<br />
“I’d worked as a security guard, I worked at Safeway,<br />
got a lot of training in the social service industry,” Warren<br />
said. “Nothing clicked. I’ve done a lot of different things<br />
– from working on a fish processor to working for CSP as<br />
a medic.”<br />
Carpentry work suited Warren, and satisfied her desire<br />
to see something substantial taking shape as a result of<br />
her toil.<br />
“See, I like building stuff, I like making things happen,<br />
seeing an end result after you do something,” Warren said.<br />
“That’s probably the biggest thing. I can go and I can drive<br />
around town and say OK, I built that, or I did that and a lot of<br />
people can’t do that. <strong>The</strong>y shuffle paperwork and the paperwork’s<br />
gone and they don’t have anything, an end result, that<br />
they can physically show somebody, ‘Hey, I did this.’”