Coming Full Circle

Cripe has partnered with The Oaks Academy since 2008 for the “Math Matters” event, which allows 8^th grade students to visit the office and learn about what the company does and how the professionals here do their jobs and work as a team. These visits are an interesting topic for me personally as I have now been on both sides of the visit. My 8^th grade class was the first class to visit back in 2008. Despite the fact that I missed the school sponsored visit due to a high school shadow day, the folks at Cripe were nice enough to allow me to come and shadow an engineer on my own to get a similar experience to the one I had missed out on. Cripe has continued to invite The Oaks 8^th grade classes back each year hoping to teach more students about the disciplines that are involved in engineering, architecture, surveying and real estate. The visits are designed to teach the students about the everyday life of a professional working at Cripe. They also convey to students an encouraging idea that the math and science courses they are taking are important and will benefit them in their future careers.

Members of The Oaks 8th grade class making a sugar cube building.

Seven years later, I have now been hired on as a Site Design Intern at Cripe. I am thrilled to be back in a place that really gave my goals and talents a direction way back in the 8^th grade. On May 29^th, the current Oaks 8^th grade class came to Cripe for their yearly field trip. This time was very cool and special for me personally for two reasons. The first being that I got to talk to the students that visited about my experiences here at Cripe and tell them all about how that visit really got my wheels turning and started me on the path toward Civil Engineering and Surveying that I am on today. The second was that my younger sister Emily is a part of the 8^th grade class this year and she got to see all of the interesting and fun things that I saw seven years ago. We are very similar in a lot of our interests and in talking about our Cripe visits we found that to be even truer as she was also very excited about all the things she learned during her classes’ visit. It was really awesome to see how Cripe as a company cares about the community that they are in and cares about the lives they can affect. They really enjoy investing in the lives of the students at The Oaks through our educational partnership, not to mention all of their other service ventures in the community. I am very happy to be a part of Cripe this summer and I hope that I am able to do my part in contributing to our company as well as our community.