3 Under 30: Emma Williams '16

Design engineer

Emma Williams ’16 recalls that, when she started engineering school at the University of Texas at Austin, she sat down in the big auditorium for orientation and saw no one but men in her row. “I was like, ‘OK, this is going to be different,’” she says. However, the all-girls environment at Santa Catalina gave her the confidence to orient herself in this new reality. “It gave me an internal strength to say, ‘I can excel in these classes. I know that I know what I’m doing.’”

Today, Emma is proving herself right. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she is now a design engineer at Magnusson Klemencic Associates, a highly regarded structural engineering consulting firm based in Seattle. For the past year, Emma has been working on a mixed-use office and residential project that’s soon to break ground in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is quite literally designing elements from top to bottom. “I’ve been designing everything from parking garages to these giant beams that will hold up a rooftop garden that’s 10 stories up,” she says.

As Emma explains, structural engineers “design the bones behind the beautiful buildings that you get to see.” In other words, they are responsible for making sure the building stays up, whether that’s through simple beams and columns or complex systems to withstand earthquakes or high winds. She adds: “It’s a lot of fun problem solving and getting to see how everything fits together. As someone who very much enjoys architecture and enjoys realizing how built spaces are designed, I like being a part of making that happen.”

Emma says she was introduced to structural engineering by Ned Stork, who taught her freshman geometry honors class. Before starting at Santa Catalina as a math teacher, Mr. Stork was a structural engineer for an international building design company based in London, and he would relate concepts that students learned in class to structures he had worked on. Emma, who was already considering architecture as a career, realized structural design would allow her to marry her math and physics skills with her appreciation for artistic vision and built environments. “Mr. Stork was one of the first people who said, ‘Hey, you might be good at this,’” Emma recalls. She also turned to him for advice when choosing an engineering program for college. “I definitely have him to thank for putting me on this path.”

[Catalina] gave me an internal strength to say ‘I can excel in these classes. I know that I know what I'm doing.

UT Austin ended up being the perfect program for Emma. In her senior year, she studied abroad at the Technical University of Denmark, where she gained an appreciation for “the elegant functionality of Danish design.” In her master’s program, she worked on a large-scale environmental project for the Texas Department of Transportation, building—and then breaking—a 60-foot-long by 5-foot-tall steel girder.

In addition to her engineering courses, Emma was able to pursue another area of interest close to her heart: the humanities. As she obtained a certificate in Core Texts and Ideas, Emma would go from huge physics lectures to small seminar-style courses that explored major themes of philosophy, religion, history, and literature through seminal writings. Always a big reader, Emma had relished similar classes at Santa Catalina and didn’t want those experiences to end. “I think it’s just a very valuable part of being a well-rounded person and citizen,” she says.

The skills she gained from her liberal arts studies have not gone to waste. Emma explains: “A lot of architecture is history and allusion. Understanding the language that architects speak and being able to read a history of certain architecture and put that into context of what I’m doing has been very helpful.” She also continues to draw on the lessons she learned in her Catalina art classes, which she took throughout her four years at the school. “Working with architects or just collaborating with other engineers—being able to take your idea and put a sketch out there to discuss facilitates conversation and innovation so much,” she says.

Emma acknowledges that, as a woman in the engineering field, she has been fortunate not to have encountered any pushback. Still, as she puts it, “There are not as many people who have paved paths for me to follow. It’s not always a given that you will find mentors who have experienced the same things as you or look like you.” That’s why she really valued her first manager at the firm where she works now. “It was the first time I actually worked directly for a woman in engineering, and it’s something I hadn’t realized I missed in past mentors I’ve had in the industry. … There’s just something about getting to observe and learn from how she interacted and how she responded to certain dynamics, certain things people would say in meetings and how she managed that.”

Emma may one day get to fulfill a similar role for another young engineer like herself, but for now she is focused on soaking up as much experience and inspiration as she can. “I came to this company in Seattle because they do some of the best work in the industry and they have some of the people with the highest expertise, so my continued plan is to keep working on really cool projects and learning as much as I can from people around me and seeing where that guides me.”