One of ACE’s goals is to attract underserved populations, Woodman says. About 85% of the New York City participants hail from minority populations, and 50% are female.
In Connecticut, approximately 250 students participate, says Maria Loitz, president of the ACE Connecticut board of directors.
Design and construction professionals from the community mentor high-school students participating in the program, meeting after school for 15 sessions from October through May, often at mentors’ offices or jobsites.
“ACE exposes kids to people who love what they do, enjoy their careers and have a great professional life,” Richardson says.
In the program, architects, engineers and construction managers describe their role in the construction process. Then the mentors and their teams of students complete a project design, transforming the youngsters’ ideas into reality.
This year, the Hartford, Conn., ACE students designed a kindergarten building for a school in Ghana. One of the former students, now a college civil engineering student, will fly to Africa this summer to oversee its construction.
The ACE Program offers the students college scholarships. Last year, the New York affiliate awarded $113,000 in scholarships, and this year, it will give out $125,000, bringing the total to more than $1 million distributed to students since the program’s inception in 1995 after Charles H. Thornton, founding principal of Thornton Tomasetti, came up with the ACE concept.
In addition, outside entities, such as Manhattan College and the Contractors’ Association of Greater New York, offer ACE participants scholarships, which will amount to about $75,000 this year.
The Connecticut affiliate has provided about $20,000 annually in scholarships during each of the past 10 years.
“We’ve had kids go through the program, go on to college and graduate, and they are now working in ACE firms,” says Woodman, adding that several have returned to the program as volunteer mentors.
Managing projects in the Big Apple Winston Warner, a project manager at Hudson Meridian Construction Group in New York, is one of those mentors. He completed the ACE Mentor Program in 1996 and now serves as president of the ACE Alumni Association.
“My experience with ACE taught me a lot about construction and architecture, but at the same time, it opened doors for my career,” says Warner . “One of the reasons I got into this field is I always thought I would have a job, even in a slow economy. You cannot outsource engineers. You cannot build a building from another country.”
Warner expects that the sour economy with fewer jobs in other industries will attract students to the ACE program and entice them to consider design and construction careers.
“Their idea of construction is the worker in the field,” Warner says. “We come in and explain the other layers you don’t see, the management and the potential salaries you can make. The kids are savvy about careers and what makes money.”
Warner earned a civil and environmental engineering degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While a freshman, he contacted ACE again about an internship. Each summer while in college, he interned for the Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey, working on interesting projects.
“By the time I started taking civil engineering classes, so many things made sense,” Warner says. “I had already done a few things in the field and been in meetings where they discussed the technical aspects of building buildings. I was able to excel at Michigan because of that.”
Warner joined Columbia Construction in Mount Vernon, N.Y., as a project engineer after graduation and rehabilitated Interstate 684 in Westchester, N.Y. Recognizing he preferred buildings to roads, he moved to Hudson Meridian about 4.5 years ago and has now completed several condominium projects.
