Stacey Young: Engineering engima

For most of us, those orange construction cones that we dodge on the freeway are a nuisance. For Stacey Young, they represent progress. Afterall, she is responsible for keeping traffic moving on the 232 state-owned roads in Lubbock and 16 surrounding counties. Young, who is the Lubbock District pavement engineer/pavement management supervisor for the Texas Department of Transportation, collects data on the roadways to determine if they need to be retopped or rebuilt and is in charge of all new pavement designs -- such as the project along U.S. Highway 62/82, which leads through Lubbock to the Crosby County line.

Her repertoire includes black hot mix, overlays and seals, and her world has been dominated by the opposite sex from her college days in chemical engineering at Texas Tech to her first job at Texas Instruments in Lubbock -- where she was the only female employee throughout the company's facilities divison. During her 23 years there, Young worked at the plant as a facilities engineer and then as equipment engineer and later was manager of planning and maintenance. She went to work for TxDOT in 1999 after TI closed its Lubbock plant.

To say Young can slip on her orange safety vest and hard hat with the best of them, might be somewhat of an understatement -- she was named Engineer of the Year in 2009 by her colleagues in the South Plains Chapter of the Texas Society for Professional Engineers -- but not surprising to Young herself.

"I always did prefer trucks to dolls," she said. "Growing up, I would have loved an erector set to play with, but back then, girls just didn't do that."

Young was a student at Lubbock High School, when the thought of a career in engineering began to take shape. The school counselor asked her to be a representative at the local professional engineering chapter's annual banquet.
Now, she's the one advocating her field as a career possibility. And it doesn't take much to get her on a soap box. "We have somewhat lost our competitive edge," she says. "The U.S. used to be the leader in industrialization; now all the new whiz bangs come from China."

Young actively seeks opportunities to speak to young people on behalf of the South Plains Chapter of the Texas Society for Professional Engineers. She also is a co-director of the West Texas BEST (Boosting Engineering Scienc and Technology) regional robotics competition, which, she says, teaches engineering principles through solving real-life challenges.
Her passion, not only for her job, but for learning new things about her world comes through as she describes an unfamiliar material discovered recently during Phase 4 of the Marsha Sharp Freeway construction. The lighweight rock, found while digging near the Fourth Street exit, was very abosorbant -- much like kitty litter.

"That could have caused all kinds of problems for us had we not discovered it and done the research," said Young, who is a member of the technical advisory panel for TxDOT's pavement/materials research program. The material is found primarily in Spain and is very rare in the United States, which, Young says, just begs for an answer as to how it got here.