Conleigh Hardin, a senior in civil engineering from Austin, Texas, attended a large high school but was in a program with fewer than 200 students. She liked the scaled down, personal feeling of it, and when it was time to decide on a college, she chose Missouri S&T for its size relative to the huge engineering colleges closer to home.
“I’ve gotten to know people across many different disciplines, in and out of my major,” she says.
As an S&T student — and particularly as a member of the inaugural cohort of Kummer Vanguard Scholars — Hardin values the freedom to explore.
“There’s room for people to be pioneers here,” she says.
So far, her own personal pioneering experiences include serving on the first Kummer Vanguard Scholars student steering committee, working with Engineers Without Borders’ Guatemala team, finding her people in Chi Omega and discovering her interest in public transportation by spending a semester in Madrid, Spain, completing two internships and participating in a colloquium on sustainable building.
And, most memorably, she enjoyed being part of a small group of students that traveled to St. Louis to meet the late June Kummer.
“She was interested in what we’re studying and our plans for the future,” Hardin recalls. “It was inspiring to meet someone who was persistent in her studies and ambitions, a woman in what was then a male-dominated world of drafting and architecture, who found her niche, became successful and shared that with so many people.”
As for Hardin’s own plans, she’s been influenced by the two internships she’s completed at an engineering firm in her hometown that specializes in government projects.
“Austin is a place with lots of big ideas, and it was cool to see how many people are involved in transportation infrastructure and how the process works,” she says.
During her second internship, Hardin had the opportunity to work with the firm’s transit and railway group, which confirmed her interest in public transportation as a career.
“I’ve always associated civil engineering with transportation,” she says. “And I think good public transportation is crucial for most cities.”