UAA Construction management program: hard-hatters secure jobs before graduation.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: BUILDING ALASKA

Sarah Smythe had just completed her senior year of high school when her father, a master mechanic for Summit Paving, found her a job as a tagger at a job site.

It wasn't exciting work, so she moved into working as a general laborer before heading off to Northeastern University in Boston. During summers, she would return to Alaska and continue working in construction jobs.

"When I graduated, I came home to Anchorage and kept doing it," Smythe said. "It was more lucrative than what I'd been going to school for, communications. It was a good workout and it was kind of nice in the summer to be outside."

Smythe worked as a grade checker for eight years, at Summit and then for Quality Asphalt Paving. She wanted to learn how projects were designed, so she decided to enroll at the University of Alaska Anchorage and study civil engineering. In the meantime, at work, QAP moved Smythe into a project engineer position.

"If no one would have said anything, I probably would have kept on with civil engineering because I didn't know there was a construction management program at UAA," Smythe said.

But someone did say something. That someone was Ben Northey, president of Colaska, QAP's parent company. Northey invited Smythe to a meeting of the UAA construction management program's advisory board--comprised of Associated General Contractors of Alaska members--and convinced Smythe to pursue a four-year degree in construction management. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management and received her degree May 1.

"Those people told me what the curriculum was for the program and made it pretty easy for me to decide to switch majors," Smythe said. "Construction management was actually what I was doing as a project engineer. Civil engineering was geared more toward design."

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CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT

Construction management deals with scheduling, budget control, labor, equipment monitoring, materials costs, job-cost tracking, construction law, how to deal with subcontractors, scope of work, construction documents and how to actually put those tools to use--how to manage projects, how to schedule jobs.

Construction management students can tackle a variety of jobs construction foreman to construction management, cost estimators, project superintendents, field engineers, assistant field engineers and working in government agencies.

Jeffrey Callahan, director of UAA's CM department, says 14 students have graduated with Associate of...