As I am exploring the civil engineering community, this lead me to interviewing the assistant project manager of the construction department in the de Moya group. The de Moya group “is a highway and bridge construction company that specializes in complex major infrastructure projects in Florida.” So essentially what my interviewee explained to me was that the Florida Department of Transportation makes projects available to a large number of companies in the area and then the company that makes the lowest bid gets the project. One of Mr. Sas’ main jobs is to figure out exactly how much it will cost for the company to construct the project, which would include labor, materials, and liability. Once he figures this out he has to find a price that will be low enough for the company to get the project but not low enough so that they don’t make money on the project. Once the de Moya group wins the project from the Florida Department of Transportation it is also Mr. Sas’ job to get all the workers in order. He was explaining to me that they have two types of employees when it comes to construction workers. The first kind of worker they hire to work on the project is the men they already have on the pay roll and he called this Self Perform. The other kind of employees they have working for them are the more specialized guys that don’t work for the de Moya group but get hired for certain jobs, for example the guys that lay concrete because they do it for cheaper then Mr. Sas’ would be able to. Another example of this is the electricians; they don’t have any electricians on the pay roll at the de Moya group so they just find other people that can do good work for cheap. Once he makes sure all the employees get paid and all the materials are paid for he has to make sure all the receipts go to the accountant so it can get recorded in the books.
After telling me about his day-to-day operations Mr. Sas’ then went on to tell me about how he got to where he is. He states that when he entered college he had no idea what he wanted to do but he knew he was good at math science yet those are both way too broad of subject and he knew he had to focus on something. He told me a story about how he always hated the traffic in Miami especially when there was construction happening at the time. On his drive to school he would take the same street everyday and it was bumper to bumper everyday due to construction that he would have to leave his house 30 minutes earlier than normal. But then once they finished construction and he saw that all the roads were newly paved and a new lane was added he knew that all the terrible traffic caused by the construction was worth it because now not only was he able to leave his 15 minutes later than before but it made him happy to drive on the newly paves roads. This is when he started researching exactly who was responsible for this new road. The group that was in charge of this road was the Oderbrecht group. He immediately tried to find an internship with this company. Jean was lucky enough to get one of only two internships available to college students. This internship lasted three months but at the end of it Mr. Sas’ was doing such great work that his supervisor was able to give him an extended internship with them. He interned with this company for about 2 years until he graduated college and then he was rewarded a full time job at the company. After doing really good work for the Oderbrecht for a while he decided that this company wasn’t big enough for him. Turns out the same supervisor that had given him the extended internship at Oderbrecht was looking for an Assistant Project Manager at the de Moya group. So Mr. Sas’ gave his old friend a call and well it all worked out and he is happily employed at the de Moya group. That is how Jean Sas got to where he is in the community I want to join.