Sometimes it’s difficult to define the things that interest you—or, more specifically, what excites you.

Early Major Project

I’ve been traveling on U.S. 31 between U.S. 30 and Indianapolis for years. A long while back, I designed part of the first bypass of Kokomo, Ind., when I was working with the Indiana Department of Highways. At that time, it was one of the largest projects I had worked on; it was exciting.

The corridor selected was fairly open, so the choice of alignment was only limited by current standards for vertical and horizontal curves; it was a new highway. Sometime after, we moved from Indiana and returned only for visits—these trips didn’t include U.S. 31. However, during that time away, another bypass was designed and constructed. “My” bypass was renamed State Road 931. Sort of exciting, I guess.

Site Seeing

The Indiana Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers holds its annual meeting on the north side of Indianapolis, and I take the senior civil and environmental students from Valparaiso University there to compete in a presentation competition with the state’s other universities. As I’ve driven this portion of U.S. 31 during the last several years, I’ve watched an at-grade railroad crossing become an overpass. It’s exciting for me to show the progress from year to year and class to class.

One year, the temporary crossovers were constructed, then the embankment for the northbound lanes, then switch traffic over to the new southbound while the northbound was constructed. Now it’s completed. I was able to explain the whole process to this year’s class. To me, that’s exciting; explaining to the students what I’ve seen during the same trip over a few years.

And to listen to them say, “On your right! Sewage treatment plant!” You have to be a certain type of engineer to get excited about that.

I hope that as part of our experiences, we’ve all found things that are exciting. I hope you have the chance to point out projects you’ve worked on to younger engineers and help instill that excitement in them. It’s a happy (exciting) moment to see someone you’ve trained or mentored as they show someone their excitement about their project.

A Big Event

Recently, I found myself, and others around me, get excited about another event. This had little to do with our infrastructure directly, but there’s a lot of engineering involved. Five of us were finishing up desserts at a restaurant just as NASA’s Artemis II mission was ending and the astronauts were returning to Earth. After discussing the whole mission for a while, we pulled up the website on a phone and pushed our desserts out of the way and began to get that feeling of excitement that comes when you realize something really big is happening.

Five adults huddled around a phone in a restaurant—so similar to my 30 friends in grade school gathered around a black-and-white television in School #8 in New Jersey, watching with excitement as we first launched a manned rocket into space with Alan Sheppard aboard and then sending John Glenn into orbit around our planet. The same excitement we felt when we sent astronauts on space shuttles to build an International Space Station.

After the porch was connected and the four astronauts emerged, we looked at each other and smiled. “That was so cool!” “Can you imagine how they’re feeling?” “This is just too amazing!” I think we forgot to finish our desserts.

It’s more than just the high level of excitement during the landing, the attaching of the porch and the opening of the door. There’s a strong sense of hope that we can do things as a community we perhaps can’t imagine as a single person. Can we now imagine what infrastructure will be required after Artemis III completes its experiments and Artemis IV returns to the moon? What types of design loads will be required to sustain a permanent site on the moon? What else can this body of engineers do?

It’s pretty exciting.