Today,
we had Erin Margolius as our guest speaker. She is a registered civil engineer
in Massachusetts and a project manager for CDM Smith. When I saw that she was
also from CDM Smith like Dr.Vicens, I thought she would be talking about the
career opportunities, however her topic was somewhat different from all of the
speakers we had so far. I felt like her speech was a lot more interesting than
for the past two weeks because the speakers were more leaned towards about the
experiences and opportunities rather than how environmental engineers are
important. Ms.Margolius began her speech with the difference between the traditional
project delivery and the alternative project delivery then talked to us how in
both systems, environmental engineers are needed.

Both traditional and alternative project delivery have some advantages as well as disadvantages.
In traditional project delivery, the owner is at the top of the cycle. The
owner would distribute his ideas and his desires to the designer and the
designer would create a model from what the owner has requested. Then that
model would be sent to the construction manager, analyzed through different
constructors and after the model is approved as safe and worth the cost, it
would get constructed.

As we can see, this process takes extremely long time because it has to go
through a lot of acceptance and people but in addition, as time goes on the
cost increases as well because you have to have these employees employed.
Furthermore, the expense and the risk of traditional project delivery is high
because firstly, the owner must find the lowest bidder since it costs a lot of
money but lower the bid, there would be more conflicts with the money and
employees. Except the advantage of the traditional project delivery is that
owner has the authority to control everyone.

On the other hand, the alternative project delivery is very different. The
owner is still the head of the process but he has less responsibility since
he/she only has to deal with the designer and construction manager. In
traditional, the owner would have to control designer, construction manager and
the G.C. Also, alternative is a lot faster and because it is faster, it costs
less money than traditional. For example, a project called Auburn-Lewiston ME
Water Treatment Facility; it only took 27 months because it was done through
alternative project delivery. It is estimated that if it was to be done by
traditional, it would take about 33 months. That is half a year worth of time
saved.
From this, it is clear that the alternative project delivery is way more efficient
as well as better for everyone since shorter the time means more jobs to be
done.

When I heard about these
projects and how engineers are the key components to these success in building
facilities and designing have made me feel like if I can someone learn more
about these technics, it can be very useful in the future when I go to japan to
help Japan with their reconstruction. As of right now, I am hoping that I can
someone move towards this pathway. I really enjoyed this speech.