“It was an opportunity to come home.” That’s how Jennifer Saugen described her decision to join the engineering staff in Wenatchee for the North Central Region of the Department of Transportation. “My husband, Steve, operates his own environmental hydrology business and could run it from anywhere. Our two dogs are always ready to go for a ride, so I jumped on the opportunity to try for a position with WSDOT’s North Central Region.” As it turned out, Saugen was the successful candidate, left CH2MHill in Centralia and became an E-2 in Wenatchee in August of 2006. A year later, she was promoted to E-3 in Bob Romine’s Project Engineering Office.
Saugen grew up in Plain, a small close knit community in the Chumstick Valley north of Leavenworth. “I’m less than an hour from family, now,” she said. Jennifer wasn’t unfamiliar with WSDOT. Before she graduated from the University of Washington in 2004 with a degree in civil engineering, she had interned at the Seattle Traffic Management Center at Dayton.
The public service aspect of engineering at WSDOT is its greatest appeal for Saugen, “The work I do here on a highway project through a community really influences and shapes its future. That’s a big responsibility. It makes the open houses, the technical advisory committees and finding consensus on solutions every bit as important as the design and construction.”
What is her advice for other engineers considering WSDOT? “There are many opportunities to work in different aspects of civil engineering and you can go as far as you want to as long as you are motivated”.
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