We've gotten our best employees the same way we got Sarah, which is to say she spent a good part of her twenties working for a large firm in a big city, says James Petersen, owner of the Portsmouth-based Petersen Engineering. By the time Sarah got here, she'd had five years of solid fundamentals under her belt, so I felt like the beneficiary of her missing the culture of home.
Like many college grads, Carter needed some time to enjoy her 20s. After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont in 2003, she moved west to the mountains of Colorado. There the Maine native spent the next year working primarily at a ski resort, giving youth lessons and punching lift tickets, while enjoying the high, pressure-free air of the Rockies.
But it wasn't long before Carter felt drawn back to a world at once more grounded and sky-bound: mechanical engineering. Leaving the high altitude and soft powder behind, Carter landed a job as an engineer at a large, high-profile firm in Washington, D.C. And while the work was rewarding most of her projects involved large government buildings after five years, Carter and her husband found themselves missing New England.
Around that same time, Carter's sister stumbled across an ad, placed by Petersen Engineering, seeking a mechanical engineer. Wasting little time, Carter applied. She landed the position after her first interview, and moved to Portsmouth. While the home-again comfort of her new company represented a welcome career change, being the only and first woman engineer threw her for a bit of a loop.
When I worked in Washington, I'd guess 40 percent of the engineers there were women, says Carter. So when I got to Petersen and noticed at project meetings that I was the only one, it was a little surprising.
Truth be told, Carter had been down this road before. When she graduated from UVM, roughly eight of the 40 graduates in her department were women. And that was considered progress at the time, she laughs.
Not that Petersen Engineering was somehow living in the past far from it. Petersen, who'd never employed a staff larger than seven, had simply always hired the best candidate for the job. This time, that just so happened to be Sarah Carter.
Really it s a matter of numbers. When there are more female professionals in the workforce, there's inherently a larger talent pool to draw from compared to a few decades ago, says Petersen. But beyond that, she's one of the most talented engineers that I've had the pleasure to work with.
Beyond trading the angled marble surroundings of the nation's capital for the Seacoast's flawed brick and clapboard, where Carter only dealt with one or two projects at a time, she now finds herself immersed in four or five assignments at once. Currently, she's splitting her time between a community housing project south of Boston, another Boston-area building emphasizing passive-solar principals, as well as a number of mill-repurposing projects throughout the region.
Being able to work on multiple projects at once isn't the only aspect of Petersen Engineering Carter quickly took to. She says she is also impressed by the firm's commitment to sustainable design practices, an area she had dabbled in while in Washington. In fact, Petersen was one of the first companies to join the Green Alliance, the Seacoast green business union launched in 2008, that now represents nearly 100 local sustainability-minded businesses.
I'd occasionally do some energy modeling for various projects, which kind of turned me on to that side of the process, says Carter. But it's easy when you work at a big firm to just be caught up in all that you're doing and not have the time to focus on that part that really interests you. So it was great when I came to Petersen and saw that that's how they approached every project.
Working at Petersen also opened Carter's eyes to issues of energy consumption its relation to design, and the many ways a person in her position could effectively mitigate them. For the better part of a year, those approaches were literally on display all around her: in the fall of 2009, Petersen began a top-to-bottom and inside-out renovation of their own offices, a project that included augmenting everything from the walls to the roof to the foundation. And while she wasn't directly involved with the day-to-day aspects of the project, Carter absorbed the myriad ways even a two-centuries-old structure could be rendered green.
The first winter we were here, it was so cold I literally had to wear a hat and mittens on several occasions, says Carter, noting it "was totally transformed" by this past winter.
Carter may still wonder whether her work will leave a legacy. Her boss, on the other hand, has little doubt.She might not consider herself as having broken through any kind of glass ceiling, but that's because she's modest, says Petersen. I think she'll end up being a great role model for the next generation of women, even if she doesn't realize it yet.
To learn more about Petersen Engineering, go to www.petersenengineering.com
For more information on Green Alliance, visit www.greenalliance.biz