Like many college students, Sarah Besecky is spending the summer working as an intern in a field related to her studies — but not all internships attract the attention of local TV and newspaper reporters like this one has.
As a kid, Besecky recently told The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress, she used to wonder how bridges stayed up. As she got older, watching buildings rise from empty lots around her Northern Virginia home turned an early interest in engineering toward an even stronger interest in civil engineering, especially construction.
This summer, as a rising third-year civil engineering major in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment at the University of Virginia, Besecky is seeing how major construction projects get done first-hand, literally from the ground up. She is an intern for Skanska, the contractor directing the renovation of UVA's Alderman Library. Skanska is a member of an industry consortium created in partnership with several major construction industry companies as part of the civil engineering program's construction engineering and management concentration, a new undergraduate and master's-level track set to launch for the 2021-2022 academic year.
As The Daily Progress reported, Besecky's responsibilities include writing a case study of a significant component of the library renovation, a process called underpinning.
“They're digging below the existing building and they have to support it or it will cave in. Underpinning is when they dig a pit and place concrete in it as a support foundation,” Besecky told reporter Bryan McKenzie. “There are 41 pits, and it's a very extensive process that's been going on for a few months already. We're just wrapping up now. I've been tracking the schedule for that and each component of placing each pit, the different days it takes for that, and to see how that's going.”
Besecky is getting a rare opportunity, Shane Wood, Skanska's project manager, said in the article: “For most civil engineers, you're never going to do a job this big with this much underpinning, this much complexity or the number of crews and teams that are on site.
“I assigned her the case study because when you have a situation like this, you need to learn it inside out. You don't see this situation very often, so you want to be able to pull all that information out 10 or 15 years from now, if you need it. This is my second underpinning and I will probably never see another one this large. I mean, when do you get to do underpinning where you have to support the entire building, except maybe in New York City?”
Besecky is still early in her undergraduate career, but the internship has increased her interest in construction management, she told The Daily Progress.
Having glimpsed the work first-hand, Besecky told UVA Engineering she is looking forward to taking courses in the construction engineering and management track to further her formal education in the field.
“I'm glad CEM options are available at UVA because I want to be well-rounded in all aspects of civil engineering,” she said.
The summer hasn't been all about site walkthroughs and tracking how long certain tasks take to complete, though — or seeing things from ground level — she said in an interview with NBC29 reporter Elizabeth Holmes.
“I've gotten to go up in the crane actually and operate it, which was really cool, really fun,” Besecky said.