Page 39 - BusinessWest October 31, 2022
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 Ashley Sullivan discusses a project at One Ferry Street in Easthampton with OTO field engineer Dustin Humphrey and client Mike Michon.
Sullivan has certainly navigated some transitions over the past few years, from taking the reins at OTO to almost immediately having
to steer it through a pandemic. For successfully leading in what is still a male-dominated field, and for being a mentor, role model, and inspiration to the next generation of civil engineers, Sullivan is certainly a Woman of Impact.
Ninth Time’s the Charm
Engineering runs in Sullivan’s family — sort
of. She said her grandmother always had a lot of respect for engineers, and her father is one of eight siblings who tried engineering but didn’t stick with it. “My grandmother really wanted one,
she shifted gears toward civil engineering, “mainly because I found that chemical engineering students ended up in a dark lab, and civil engineering students were outside in the quad, and that just looked a lot more enjoyable to me.”
The big thing I stressed
was, we all have value, and we’re all part of a team, and we need to be rowing the same way.”
When she graduated in 1998, a lot of the jobs being offered at the time were at the Big Dig
in Boston, and she wasn’t interested in heavy construction, so she stayed in graduate school, where she gained the experience she would put to use at OTO two years later.
“I was working for a Mass Highway project where we were installing wells, doing groundwater sampling, modeling groundwater flow, looking at contamination, and two years later I had my master’s in environmental engineering,” she said. “I interviewed at OTO because they were local, in Springfield, and halfway through the interview with Jim Okun and Mike Talbot, I thought I’d like to work there. It was a small firm, everybody seemed very nice, and it seemed to suit my personality.”
OTO’s services over the years have included
 so I said I’ll try it.”
The truth is, Sullivan had already cultivated
an interest in chemistry in high school and was considering studying environmental engineering at UMass Amherst — a place where, again, her insecurity nagged at her.
“I did very well in high school, but I was nervous about going to a challenging school, or
a school where there were others who would do really well too. That plays into why I like to give people confidence and why I do what I do. On the outside, I did well and came across like I had a lot of confidence. But inside, I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea.’”
She had a positive experience at UMass, though
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  Women of
Women of IMPACT IMPACTA PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST
A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST Women of
Women of IMPACT IMPACT A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST
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