When she was growing up, Caroline Walwyn moved around a lot. But the shifts in location were just new starting points for a path that she was always meant for: construction management.
Caroline Walwyn
“When my family moved to Florida in 2015, our house was in a developing area, so every day I saw progress being made to the surrounding communities,” she recalls. “I started to wonder: how do they even create one hundred houses on a piece of land that was previously a farm?”
Walwyn is learning the answers at Drexel. She initially applied to be an interior design major, but her innate curiosity drove her to switch to construction management before she even arrived on campus. “It felt right, and I thought it would help me learn more about the questions I was asking every day regarding construction.”
That passion has continued through Walwyn’s co-op experience. Her third and final Spring-Summer co-op is being spent at Bancroft Construction, assisting on-site at a major renovation and laboratory addition at Drake Hall at the University of Delaware.
“I wanted to work on-site and be in a field position,” Walwyn says. “I can learn the most about construction by being on-site in person and watching the project grow each day.”
“I have been able to get a full picture of what the different roles in construction are. It is reshaping what I want to do.”
Caroline Walwyn
Walwyn’s official position is a Field Engineer, a role that gives her insight into multiple functions on the job.
“I spend a lot of time being a part of every role on site,” she says. "I shadow the Superintendent on site, and I also help the project manager with tasks or things on Procore, a management software that many construction companies use to document processes on site.”
Walwyn values the variety that she experiences each day learning outside of the classroom, and says that she is looking forward to bringing what she has learned back to campus.
“I have been able to get a full picture of what the different roles in construction are,” she says. "It is reshaping what I want to do, and there are a lot of ideas I have relating to what I want to do next. It has been almost two months of working here and I already have so much to say and teach my friends and classmates.”