The Wightman Connection

Wightman has been building and rebuilding southwest Michigan with the help of WMU alumni since it was founded in 1946—and serves as an integral part of the civil engineering student experience. Currently 22 WMU alumni are working for Wightman. 

 “Wightman was one of the first companies I was exposed to and when you think of local civil and construction firms they always come to mind,” says Hall. 

Renaldi talks about working with senior design projects and the enjoyment of getting students through their final year. Both he and Boyd help students build professional connection—and provide scholarships through ASCE. 

The Wightman experience

Noah Boyd sits in his area of the open floor planned layout of the new Wightman building, as his colleagues busy themselves in the background. The meeting has become part of the reorganized reality for Boyd as a civil engineer project coordinator. Noah is a realist—his job is about managing expectations. Every project he coordinates involves turning the dreams of his clients into realities. “I deal with all the unseen parts of a project,” says Boyd. “I never get bored.” 

Boyd’s day-to-day tasks involve finding solutions: whether it’s measuring soil contamination or figuring out how to manage wetlands, every project brings a myriad of government regulations and workplace oddities to  manage. A common difficulty? “It’s almost always when the client has attempted to fix the problem themselves before calling Wightman.” Every project is unique in how he must weigh the value of his client. For instance, in working with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, preserving nature played an important role in how they designed projects. Meanwhile, a requirement for industrial designs may be to maximize parking spaces. 

Frank Renaldi puts his career and civil engineering into a broad context. His career began before the widespread use of computing, when hand calculations were required. He is witnessing a future when augmented reality could be a common part of the job. Take the process of drafting a site plan, which use to involve a two- or three-person crew surveying every nook and cranny. Now, much of the work can be done by coordinated technological systems that take pictures, accurately measure, and reproduce functional design drafts.

Renaldi is most proud of his sewer systems and comically laments that his best projects get buried. He is also proud of working to re-rapid the river in Williamston and about bringing the environment back to communities. Currently working on a water system for Marcellus, Michigan, Renaldi shows off how his system can now manage a large amount of data while giving him increased flexibility. The high definition laser scanning system that allows him to take measurements from any point within a building is one example of the technology he sees as so valuable to him.

Wightman believes in a holistic approach to design. Student interns typically start on survey crews, inspecting projects or collecting field data—basically getting their hands dirty. They learn to design on the fly to meet the unique needs of a situation. Renaldi says students need to learn that the best-laid plans in the office meet harsh realities in the field. “This makes them much better designers as they know what it is like in the field.” New engineering students have to learn how to adapt, and more importantly, they have to learn how to communicate. When plans run into problems they learn how to build rapport so that the team can come together. It is this experience that Hall says he is looking most forward to while at Wightman.

Wightman and the City of Kalamazoo

If you’ve driven around Kalamazoo this summer and look out your window at road construction you might see Sam Hall getting the experience Wightman promises—hands on and in the field. Wightman is at the center of some of the major projects going on in the Kalamazoo area, including the complete redesign of Stadium Drive. 

Similarly, Wightman is also in the early stages of the redesign of downtown Kalamazoo, where the removal of the one-way streets is expected to dramatically change how Kalamazoo drivers maneuver around downtown. They are also contributing to the construction of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency (KRESA).

The future of civil engineering

Boyd notes that there are concerns about material shortages, rising costs, the instability of local ordinances, concerns over meeting labor needs, and the desire of clients to always want better buildings with lower costs. Yet he sees these as cyclical concerns that are always going to be an issue in some capacity. 

Renaldi's biggest concerns are mainly tied to labor. Finding the proper number of workers is a problem as is getting students to join the field and get their hands dirty. He also says that recent inflation,rising costs and supply chain issues also present a concern for the future. 

On the technical side of the future, Renaldi paints a dynamic vision of the future of civil engineering. From scanning job sites to allowing local governments more control over their city infrastructure the possibilities for Frank seem endless. Drones for example have increasingly been used to map areas for measurement. This accelerates the time and manpower needed for those measurements. It also creates its own problem, as civil engineering becomes quicker and more efficient with measuring, a bottleneck can develop in the design process. For every speed up in one process, the future may create a delay further down the project’s development and it is up to the company to learn how to manage a quickly changing workforce operating with quickly changing technology. 

According to Renaldi, the future of how cities build and maintain their infrastructure is going to be significantly improved: An entire system of augmented reality imaging could allow contractors to take measurements without ever being at the job site. What this means for contracting is a significant time reduction in going through redundant, outdated, and uninterpretable information. 

And increased access to data has the potential to speed up and improve the ways cities react to crises and allow for safer communities. Just think if water quality and management can be as simple as a login, then issues such as lead or PFAS in the water system can be addressed quicker and with less harm to the community.

When you talk with Hall, his deeply engaged desire to know how our cities work is a glimpse of the potential that our WMU students offer the future of our community. When he graduates in 2023, he hopes to explore where civil engineering can take him. He would love to spend years exploring the development of transportation systems and how they adapt to new technologies and deal with new issues such as climate change. He is fascinated by how civil engineering is learning to adapt to more livable cities.

Hall knows that renewed focus on infrastructure means that civil engineers are going to be at the forefront of how our cities look and how that impacts our lives. And, he knows that Kalamazoo can count on Wightman—and that Western Michigan alumni with Wightman blazed shirts and hard hats will be at the construction sites of tomorrow’s Kalamazoo.