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Each month we are featuring one of our 2020 WTS Metropolitan Phoenix Awards recipients. This month we are spotlighting our Honorable Ray LaHood Award Recipient Andrew Haines, Manager of Projects at Jacobs.  Andrew has been a pillar of the metropolitan Phoenix engineering community for over fifteen years and has been a supporter of WTS since moving to the Valley in 2004. 

We talked with him about how he joined the transportation industry and why it's important to mentor and support each other throughout our careers.  

What led you to this career?

Believe it or not, my initial degree was a BA in Latin American Studies and Foreign Affairs. I was going to either be in the Diplomatic Corp, CIA, State Department, maybe get a law degree. I was working in Washington DC for a few years and felt like I was pushing paper – I had nothing tangible to show for the work I did. I am in my middle 20’s and still had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. I asked my future father in law for a little advice, told him the results of my graduate school test scores (GRE’s) and that I did really well in math and analytics. He was a college history professor and immediately stated he would wonder why I wasn’t in engineering. My dad was an engineer so I, of course, had run as far from that as possible. But it made sense and as I thought about it, the Golden Gate Bridge came to mind and bridge/structural engineer it was! The University of Texas at Austin was the only school that admitted me to their graduate program and I needed a lot of basic engineering coursework before I could start taking graduate classes but after 4 years, I had the equivalent of an undergraduate and masters degrees in civil engineering with a focus on structures. I was 30 year old just starting out in engineering.

Who has influenced you most when it comes to how you approach your work?

Both my mom and dad were officers in the Marine Corps (it’s where they met) and I would have to say the drive to the best you can be, the drive to do your very best each time came from them, particularly my mom. If she wanted to do something, it was as good as done. But it terms of the workplace, my very first boss in DC, Janice Hontz, a supremely confident Southern woman with the heaviest North Carolina accent ever, taught me so many lessons in dealing with people, particularly with people in high positions. We worked in the President’s Office at the Nature Conservancy and we were the prime source of contact between the organization and its Board of Directors. One thing about Washington DC is that it frequently teaches people to say to others what they think that person wants to hear, rather than the truth or what they are really thinking. I learned from Janice the value of being direct with people but always being NICE about it. Leading with that approach versus the typical DC approach has served me well.

Why do you feel it’s important to support the advancement of women in the transportation industry?

Short answer, I do not see that women are still treated as fully equal to men in the transportation field. It does not occur all the time, and women have advanced quite a bit I our industry, but unequal treatment still occurs; and it shouldn’t. From my own perspective, probably from having a Marine mom, I have always felt and acted without regard to gender (or race, creed, politics, etc.) and I treat people as individuals. I support the advancement of all my colleagues, all of them whether male or female. But I also can see that the transportation industry has been heavily male dominated for a long time. My particular field, structural engineering, probably even more so than other disciplines. A Texas colleague of mine, now a distinguished professor at Stanford, Sarah Billington, was only the second woman to receive a PhD in Structural Engineering at UT and that was in 1997 (and the first was only awarded in 1994)! Given that backdrop, it is unusual that my supervisors/bosses for the first 15 years of my career were women structural engineers. But I have noticed that women have not received the professional respect due to them. At meetings with my boss, contractors, even clients would turn to me, the man, for feedback even though I was the junior engineer. While things have changed and we see many more women in positions of authority in transportation, I still see similar things happen today. It shouldn’t but until such a time as it doesn’t, I will continue to support the advancement of women in transportation.

What value do you see in mentorship throughout your career?

We have a mother and a father to teach us as children because we do not have experience in the world and we just don’t know a lot of things as we mature. When we get into the workforce, once again we really do not know a lot of what we are doing but, unless you are following in the family business, mom and dad aren’t typically there anymore to guide us. We need mentors to help us mature in the workforce; people we can lean on when we need workplace guidance; people with whom we can bounce ideas off; people that can help us learn from our mistakes or offer advice on mistakes they made in the hopes we won’t repeat them. Mentorship also does not need to be a formal program. It can also lie in the hundreds of water cooler conversations we have with our colleagues.

What’s one professional skill you’re currently working on?

It’s a secret! I typically don’t like to discuss what I am working on until I have mastered it.

Share something most people don’t know about you?

My wife and I were house flippers way back in 1993 except we flipped to be able to eventually buy the house we really wanted but couldn’t afford initially. We learned to do virtually all the trades ourselves, lived in our flips, and worked our full time jobs while working on the house at night. 3 places in 6 years got us where we wanted to be.

If you could trade places with anyone for a day, who would you choose?

I would trade places with any FA-18 pilot currently deployed and flying sorties off the deck of an aircraft carrier. I was an inch and half too short and my eyesight not perfect enough to become a naval aviator so it is an unfulfilled dream to fly fighter jets and take off and land on a carrier.