When she was a young girl, Laura Mathieu recalled that she was always good at math and science. She eventually became interested in engineering because her Dad suggested it, and said that she’d be good at it.
“I just had the technical mind,” the Indiana native said. “I liked to build things with Legos and see how things worked.”
As she grew older, her interest and love of math and science combined with concerns for the environment. She won a full collegiate scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terra Haute after writing an inspiring essay which caught the attention of the school’s admissions officials.
“When I was younger, I was a very big environmental advocate and I wanted to do my part to ‘save the planet’ which was a little extreme,” she said. “So I wrote this story about myself…spurred on by a developer who cut down trees where we used to play. This awakened my passion for being environmentally friendly. I was really fascinated by combining science and sustainability, and that got me got me the scholarship.”
Mathieu selected chemical engineering as a major with an environmental emphasis. She was one of five female engineering students in her class when she started school in 2001.
“I loved chemistry. It was my thing,” she said. “I liked working in the lab and making things happen from mixing elements. I was still passionate about cleaning up the environment. But after a year, I took my first organic chemistry class and I decided I didn’t want to take chemistry anymore.”
Mathieu said that it was made clear to her quickly that she didn’t want to purse a chemical engineering degree any longer since most jobs would lead to the pharmaceutical fields after graduation.
“So then I asked myself how I could continue my passion to help clean up the environment, so my advisors said I should go into civil engineering.”
What Mathieu discovered in college was that engineering “doesn’t teach you how to be an engineer, it teaches you how to solve problems.” In her junior and senior years in college she and her classmates worked together on projects as teams.
“That taught us how to work with different people with different ways of getting a project accomplished.”
Mathieu graduated with a degree in civil engineering in 2005. She veered more into construction than civil engineering when she entered the workforce, but she found it enjoyable and challenging.
“My favorite thing about engineering and what we do in construction is that whatever is in the design isn’t always what you find in the field. There are existing conditions that you can’t predict and plan for, so my job is to find a solution based on what’s actually there and how to make it work within the requirements.”
At the Wilmington District’s U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) Resident Engineer Office Mathieu has found a challenging niche. The pace of construction on the installation is on par with Fort Bragg’s operations tempo which is heavily influenced by USASOC, the 82nd Airborne Division, and other high-speed units.
“Our job is more to oversee and manage the contracts and focus on quality assurance,” she stated. “The best thing that we can do in the construction team, in my opinion, is be more forward thinking and being aware of what’s coming up next. You know your schedule and you know where the contractor falls, so you can catch problems early on which saves money and time. And in the relationship that you build with the contractor you develop a level of respect for each other because at the end of the day you have the same goal.”
Mathieu said that she adapted a long time ago to working in a male-dominated field. She’s a “people person,” and loves to share the technical knowledge she’s learned over the years with her colleagues. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recognizes the critical role that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leaders of the global marketplace, and enabling the Department of Defense and Army in the security of our Nation. She feels that STEM programs are excellent ways for getting young girls interested in something that they may have never considered.
“But you have to like it," she said. "If somebody has an interest in math and science there’s absolutely a place for them in engineering. You have to reach students when they’re in late middle school when they’re making up their minds up.”
An obvious question almost always seems to rise about women in engineering; can you keep your femininity in check working with a bunch of guys?
“My safety glasses are pink!” she said with a laugh. “They’re OSHA and EM 385-approved, but they’re pink. No guy’s going to walk off with them. There’s some thought process behind that!”