From FORTRAN to FERC

It’s the 1980s. My family moves from Ohio to California and I start a new school named after Neil Armstrong, the famous astronaut. The then-Ohio State Senator is the famous astronaut, John Glenn. The hit movie, SpaceCamp, debuts. By the age of 12, I realize I’m destined to become an astronaut.

Fast forward to 1992, and I am over the moon to receive an early acceptance to UCLA’s aerospace engineering program. The only female in the program? No problem. I’m off to study rocket science!

While most of my engineering peers are in computer labs learning the cool new programming language called C++, me and about 15 other befuddled undergrads are holed away in a tiny classroom learning the language of the United States space program: FORTRAN.

No computer lab for us; just a bunch of punch cards. (Not sure what I’m talking about? Check out the movie?Hidden Figures.) Oh, but there are numbers. I love numbers! Who needs English composition and grammar classes when you can work with numbers all day long?

Five years later, I’m about to graduate college with honors, but I’m also a loan-ladened college student and I need money for graduate school. So, I accept a job offer making $10 an hour to answer phones, take messages on those pink “while you were out” notepads, and make photocopies at an environmental consulting firm. Little do I realize, but my journey of working on Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) projects is about to begin.

The company’s office is a converted house and the copy room resides in a closet on the second floor. I cringe to think of the copious hours I spent in that tiny, windowless space, churning out thousands of photocopies to be hole-punched, inserted into binders, and snail-mailed to regulatory agencies and field teams. And our office is at capacity so I don’t even have a desk.

The copier and I are best buds. Any time I leave its side, it jams or decides to randomly skip pages or runs out of toner, paper, or both. We spend a lot of quality time together.

To combat boredom, I read the documents I’m photocopying. It’s then that I’m introduced to a strange new world that involves FERC, sidebooms, and something called a waterbar. Clearly, this waterbar thing is something very impressive because it’s mentioned many times in the documents I read. Little did I know.

One day I receive some exciting news. I’m being sent to Montrose, Colorado as an environmental coordinator on a large natural gas pipeline project. There will still be photocopying, but there will also be daily inspection reports to review and edit (I guess that English composition and grammar class came in handy after all), paper tracking sheets to be entered into electronic spreadsheets (numbers galore), and thousands of photos to label and organize.

Best of all, I will have my own desk in my own office. Never mind that it’s in a construction trailer with no windows or heating vents. It is all mine! And who needs heat during the winter in Colorado? It is an exciting three-month stint that involves lots of overtime pay and a living per diem.

Dressed for the occasion. Stacey weathers the cold in her unheated construction trailer while on assignment in Montrose, Colorado.

Instead of a hotel room, I rent a questionable two-bedroom trailer in a trailer park, complete with a communal clothesline. Oh, the stories I could tell! But it’s only temporary and the price tag for grad school includes several zeros, so I need to save my money.

The crowning moment of my time in Colorado is the day I visit the construction right-of-way to help inspect (wait for it)…waterbars! Needless to say I was utterly disappointed to learn that a waterbar is nothing more than a depression in the dirt.

Two years later, I’m lured by a $15 an hour assignment with plenty of overtime and a very generous living per diem to spend nine months as an environmental coordinator on a large pipeline project in Maine. Another year of saving will certainly help limit the amount of student loans I need, so off I go.

On the job. Stacey enjoys a day on the pipeline right-of-way while working in Maine.

Now, 23 years later, I’m still working in environmental consulting. I never did attend grad school and I am clearly not an astronaut. The closest I’ve gotten to outer space is soaring 30,000 feet above ground.

Somewhere along the way, in my quest to save money for grad school, I stumbled into my career. I now know a lot more about waterbars, sidebooms, and FERC, and I use that English composition and grammar stuff all the time.

I went from answering phones and making photocopies to a rewarding career in environmental regulatory compliance and project management for multimillion-dollar natural gas pipeline projects.

While I don’t speak FORTRAN anymore, I am fluent in FERC. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Article originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of Currents.