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Born to Build: CSI Members On Their First Jobs in the Construction Industry

By Peter Kray posted 09-25-2019 04:10 PM

  

2019 Class of Fellows honoree Cherise Lakeside began her illustrious career in the construction industry with a job as a receptionist at a construction company at the age of 17. In a recent CSI Community Connect questions, CSI members were asked, "What was your first construction-related job, and how did it inspire your pursuit of a career in the industry?"

“Sweeping up and cleaning paint brushes. I was about eight-years-old.”
Jeffrey Pilus CSI, CCCA, AIA Ass., USGBC, SCIP

My first construction job was deconstructing finishes and furnishings on the first floor and basement of my 1880's three-story Queen Anne home, a victim of the 1972 Agnes flood (from Hurricane Agnes). Over the next year, while finishing my high school senior year, I completed the finish carpentry work.

This experience, along with the fact that my father was a city planner and geographer, did influence checking out architecture as one major to explore. I did not actually decide to become a career architect until I was beginning my M.Arch master's thesis some 10 years later.
Jonathan Miller AIA, FCSI, CDT, CCS, CCCA, SCIP, USGBC

My first job was handing shingles to my dad on the roof at four-years-old. I was paid in chocolate milk and baloney sandwiches.​ Over the years, I worked with my dad and then with others, but never really focused on construction. When I graduated high school, I began working as a mechanic, eventually shifting to construction equipment.

During hard economic times, I started doing repairs and remodeling and sometimes worked as a day laborer to make ends meet. It was that time of learning by doing that I found the confidence to realize, not only can I actually build every part of a house, but I knew how to put the pieces together in planning out the job.

I had always enjoyed creating things with my hands and mind. So with the support of family I went to school, and when I was 38, earned my Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute.

Partly, is was the lure of my father and his father having been in business constructing houses. The other part is the passion for designing and planning that has brought me to this point, and will guide me from here on.
Clint Newton III, CSI, CDT

 

House painting - family home first, applying white Dupont Lucite latex paint (late 1960s) for $2 a day; and later, re-staining an aunt's home for maybe a bit more.

Then, assisting a neighbor and family friend, who was a contractor, with demolition debris removal from a remodel project.

We struck a deal for $20, and I thought it was great. Except the plaster part is heavy to get from a wheelbarrow into the back of a pickup truck, and there was a fee to be paid at the dump! (Said dump is now the location for the University of Oregon's Autzen Stadium, more or less).

I told Mr. Street about that, expecting maybe to get a bit more money to offset my unexpected expense, and he helped me understand a bit about contracting when he said, "We made a deal which we both liked at the time; sometimes I also forget to check out what all the costs would be, but I don't get to ask for more money if I could have learned ahead of time.”

Joel Niemi CSI

When I was 18 years old, in my first summer vacation after my freshman year of college, I managed to land a job as an assistant to a town engineer in the area where I grew up. Mostly it was drafting at a drafting board but it included other stuff too, including a half-baked preliminary design for a new sludge dewatering system at the town’s wastewater treatment facility. Mostly, I helped ‘design’ and draft minor extensions of sewer lines, waterlines, storm sewers, and curb-gutter-sidewalk projects.

Still, I wholly designed a relatively small storm sewer project in an existing residential area. When I returned home for Thanksgiving break several months later, there was my new storm sewer project, just as I’d designed it. It was so cool--despite how small and mundane it seems to recount it today--that, when I got back to the university, I changed my major from aerospace engineering to civil engineering.

A few years later, when I graduated and got my first “real” full-time job, it was with the consulting engineering firm that had replaced the now-former town engineer. One reason the firm hired me was because the principal had seen my name all over all the documents I'd drafted in the town engineering department’s office and said to himself, “This kid will know where everything is in the office at the town hall.”

I worked for that firm for nine months before returning to the university for grad school.
Kevin O'Beirne, PE, FCSI, CCS, CCCA

 

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