Just a few short days from now I will be joining the AAJ members in Portland as one of the selected Scholarship recipients for the Fall Conference. I have been scrambling, as I am certain many others are, in preparation for the trip. I am very excited for the opportunity and, from the bit of research I have done prior to this, I am very excited to learn more about the topics that will be presented.
I graduated from Iowa State University in 2003 with my BArch and followed my husband to Michigan in the middle of a depressed economy. I was lucky enough to work for an engineering firm for a couple of years before finding a position at an AE firm whose focus was the education market. In 2007, I joined TowerPinkster in Kalamazoo, Michigan and have been working as a Project Coordinator since. I have been able to work in a variety of markets, but Justice work has been a consistent thread of work that I appreciate in my resume. I have worked on jails, courts, juvenile detention facilities and sometimes when I work on a 'regular' school it strikes me how similar they are to some of the detention facilities. One of my current projects is a new family court in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is located adjacent to the juvenile detention facility on a complicated site and is consolidating multiple public serving offices into one location. It promises to continue to be a challenging project that will keep my busy with documentation and then construction administration for quite some time.
Outside of my justice work I have also been able to work on a Math and Science center that was a Private-Public Partnership between Battle Creek Public Schools and Kellogg Company. At the conference I hope to learn more about this form of project delivery along with many of the case studies that will be presented. Along with P3, I am looking forward to learn more about sustainability implementation in justice projects and absorbing as much additional information as I can.
See you soon in Portland!