Name: Kaitlyn Avidan
Hometown: Hastings, Minn.
Major: Environmental engineering, environmental science
Position: Water resources designer at Stantec
Since enrolling at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Kaitlyn Avidan dreamed of working for Stantec, a global design and consulting business that works on a wide range of infrastructure and facilities projects.
Being hired by the company with more than 450 locations across North America and offices on six continents didn’t seem likely at first, said Kaitlyn, an environmental engineering major from Hastings, Minn. She applied for numerous positions with the company and gave her resume to Stantec representatives at job fairs. But she never heard anything back.
“I applied for jobs. I gave them my resume at career fairs. But I never got any responses,” Kaitlyn recalled.
Then she unexpectedly received a call from Stantec in January asking if she wanted to be interviewed for a position in its Twin Cities office. She put her best foot forward and a few weeks later she was offered the job.
Kaitlyn was really shocked at the job offer and grateful, she said. She accepted the position as a water resources designer and is extremely excited to begin working on May 13, just nine days after she graduates from UWRF with a degree in environmental engineering.
“I am honored that I will be working for one of the top 10 design firms in the world,” she said. “The opportunities there are endless. I will be surrounded by really smart people doing really good work.”
As much as she hoped to work at Stantec, Kaitlyn said she was torn when she was offered the job there. She had just accepted a position as a water resources engineer for another company, Westwood Professional Services, a national engineering firm she had interned with. But the Stantec position was too good to pass up, she decided.
The fact that Kaitlyn received two job offers several months before graduation from prestigious engineering companies is testament to the quality education she received at UWRF, she said. She credits the small class size and personal attention from professors as keys to her success.
“That nearly one-on-one attention is very advantageous for this kind of high-level science work,” she said.
Kaitlyn praised UWRF faculty for working with industry to find out what programs and equipment are used in the workplace and making sure students have access to that same equipment. She mentioned faculty members Patrick Woolcock, Joel Peterson and Jill Coleman Wasik as dedicated teachers who inspired her to learn more.
“All my professors know what my dreams and aspirations are, and they are willing to help me achieve them. They support us as students not just in school but in all of our passions,” she said.
Kaitlyn grew up loving nature and credits her parents with immersing her in the outdoors throughout her childhood. She initially studied environmental science at UWRF but decided she could have a bigger impact by studying environmental engineering instead.
“With environmental science, you understand and discover the problems. But with environmental engineering I feel like I can come up with solutions to those problems,” she said.
Kaitlyn is set to take her passion to the workplace where she plans to use the skills she has learned at UWRF to limit the impacts of infrastructure projects on nature.
“I always believed in doing the right thing by mother nature,” she said. “Now I get the opportunity to do that in a big way at my job, and I am so excited to do that work.”