The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008

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