“Growing up I always loved amusement parks and that’s what got me in to doing engineering,” says Nathan Ward, director of tunnelling projects at Paul C Rizzo Associates (Rizzo). However, his career path has ended up taking him below ground, rather than above it.
It was through his local theme park that Nathan became an engineer. “I never really had much guidance about college from my parents as neither of them went. But, there was an amusement park where I grew up called Kennywood Park, and they were putting in a new rollercoaster in 1991, called the Steel Phantom. I found out about the company that was designing it and I sent them a letter asking what I would have to do to design rollercoasters when I grew up. The designer, Ron Toomer, wrote me back and said to study engineering, either electrical and mechanical or civil, so I went to engineering school.”
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After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, Nathan worked at several companies before deciding to do an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, which he completed last year. “That was a busy three years for me,” he explains. As part of the programme, his chosen track, the path an MBA takes, focused on marketing.
He thinks that it was a mixture of experience from working at other organisations and his recently earned MBA that has led him to start, a year ago, in such a prolific position at such a young age. He explains that it’s hard to find people with an engineering degree who also have good business sense.
“People who have an engineering background with even the slightest inkling of business sense should pursue that route. Really, to find someone who has an engineering degree, a business degree and a good personality is very tough.”
And that background has been very useful, he says. “I think it’s helpful to understand things from a technical standpoint of course, but you also have to be business savvy. You have to see the whole picture.”
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By GlobalDataAfter working for a transportation company prior to starting his MBA, Nathan was familiar with tunnelling, from the other side, he says, “putting together a rail system, how do you get a train from point A to point B.” But it wasn’t until he started his job with Rizzo, working out of its Pittsburgh-based corporate headquarters, that he really started to get into the tunnelling industry.
At the moment, Rizzo, an engineering and consulting company, is involved with several projects in the US, including the North Shore Connector project in Pittsburgh, and it also has a crew in South America. “I’ve been lucky enough to take a trip there,” says Nathan. “They’re at very high altitudes, 4,000m above sea level. They’re battling the elements, doing pretty advanced geo-technical investigations at places where probably people shouldn’t even be. It’s great that there’s such a scope of projects going on at the moment.”
While he enjoys working on tunnelling projects, he says one career highlight has been at a previous job where he had to try to convince people certain ideas could work. “Sometimes people don’t fully understand something until they see it, so you have to just do it,” he explains.
“I worked at Bombardier for a few years doing mechanical design work. We did a project in Miami, the Downtown People Mover, it’s like a driverless subway train but it’s on an elevated cement platform. We had an opportunity to incorporate new technologies that hadn’t been incorporated before.”
While he admits there were moments when the project manager didn’t always appreciate the team’s ideas because of conflicts like timing and planning approval: “At the end of the day it ended up being a really successful project and the client was thrilled.”
He says, “it’s something I’m very proud to have been involved with. It’s something where I can point at things and say, ‘that was my idea.’”
“That’s why people go into engineering. We don’t have inventors anymore. At least no one calls them that. Thomas Edison, he was an inventor, and what he was doing was engineering.”
Outside of work, Nathan enjoys playing music with his band and leading his son’s Cub Scout group. Having been a scout when he was a boy, he jumped at the chance to become a leader when his son was keen to join. While the boys are too young to go on long trails they do study for their badges, attend summer camp for a week and go on special trips. One place that Nathan has enjoyed taking them to is a local attraction called Laurel Caverns, the largest cave in Pennsylvania.
It’s a geological anomaly as it is formed of a low calcium limestone made up of 70 per cent silica grains cemented together with 30 per cent calcium carbonate and a small amount of iron oxide. As it was also formed in an area of folded and fractured rock, the cave tilts fifteen degrees, resulting in many steep passageways. “They learn a lot about geology here, which is fascinating for someone who understands these concepts,” he says.
What about a theme park based on tunnelling? “To have the world’s first subterranean theme park would be really cool,” he says.
Nathan Ward
