The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008

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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.’”
The crash forced Warren to examine her life and what she would have to do to create a new livelihood. “You go through the panic, the depression, the denial,” she said. “It’s just how you deal.” Warren spoke to a vocational rehabilitation counselor and learned that there were plans to launch a construction management degree program at UAA. “Instead of going into something that I didn’t have any relation to, I chose to go into construction management,” she said. “I found resources, got scholarships, got loans. Vocational rehab helped me. It wasn’t easy – I was on food stamps for awhile. It was kind of a dramatic time in my life. It only takes two seconds and your life as you know it can be done.” The most challenging course Warren took in the CM curriculum was statics. “The last time I had calculus was 1984,” she explained. “I did well in it the first time I took it, but just trying to remember back that far … that’s probably the most challenging, trying to remember the stuff you took beforehand. It’s not like I just got out of high school and it’s all fresh and new. It was a challenge to get back into the math type of thing. And I’m good at math.” That grounding served Warren well in her CM courses. “You can’t move dirt without knowing how much you’ve got to move, how much it’s going to take to fill a hole or how much you’ve got to take out of a hole to put a building into it or to build a road or any of those type things,” she said. “It all comes down to your basics, math and English. If you don’t have those, you can’t do anything.” The newly instituted CM curriculum, presented by instructors with experience in the field, taught Warren a complex network of financial and organizational skills that result in a successfully completed construction endeavor. Warren said that at the beginning of a project, probably 90 percent of it is all computer-based: figures, facts, paperwork, trying to get things ready, ordering materials, doing research on the phone, calling people, getting quotes. “Adding up the numbers so you know where you can get the best deal for whatever you’re buying or whatever
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Page 7 and 8: HOMER WATER TREATMENT PLANT PROJECT
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Page 86: The Politics of Construction Vote
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The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008

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