Work ethic and a sense of accomplishment are key in any industry. Jasmine Huff, a survey technician at MSK Engineers in Bennington, understands this process but her effectiveness is also because of years of experience understanding the concept of leadership and being results-driven.
Huff says she always liked science and history from an early age. “I’m more of a logical thinker than I am in the creative sense. That’s just naturally the way I’ve been my whole life. My dad was a carpenter my whole life. And we were constantly working on projects around the house.” She would always help her dad build porches or decks or in the barn. Huff specifically remembers building a walnut jewelry box with her dad for her mother for Mother’s Day.
Huff also had a sense of exploration and of the outdoors when she was growing up in upstate New York, “Our nearest neighbors were half a mile away. And one farmer owned thousands of acres on the other side of the hill that my parents lived on. So were fortunate that we had mostly had free range of that whole area growing up. We would run around in the woods, build forts, hunt squirrels and catch frogs. We just entertained ourselves.”
These early years began to shape what Huff wanted to do with her life. “It was a lot of trial and error for me. I originally wanted to be a physical ed teacher. So after high school, I went to Springfield College.”
Huff was active in high school in terms of sports. “I ran cross country, played soccer, and then I did indoor and outdoor track. I was really into just the outdoors in general. I did quite a few of the high peaks in New York before I even graduated high school.”
Huff had confidence, she says, at an early age. “I’ve been myself my entire life,” she says “For the most part, I’ve always been like, ‘This is me. Take it or leave it.’” She always knew who she was and what she believed in. “I wasn’t afraid to take a stand and stand up for my younger teammates.” Huff thought teaching was something she wanted to do but, after a year at Springfield College, she realized that this career path wasn’t for her. She thought there was too many politics. Huff would coach in the summer when she would come home and would run into people who would say “I own everything in town so my kids should be on the starting lineup no matter what.” Her response: ‘But you know, they bullied their teammate and missed a practice before the game. So sorry…no”
A good method of approach she adopted was “to watch and listen and just take things in and observe…and actually listen to what people are telling you. It won’t to take you long to figure out how some people operate and the way they think.”
Another aspect that changed her trajectory was that one of her best friends she grew up with passed away at the end of her first year at Springfield College. She says, at that age, she didn’t have the appropriate coping skills. “I just knew I needed a change. I wasn’t making great decisions.” While she lost both of her grandfathers before she left for school, the death of her friend really impacted her. She doesn’t mean that the loss of her kin hurt any less. “But when your friend, who’s 17 and you’re 17, suddenly dies, it feels way more personal, or at least it did for me. It was kind of a turning point for me.”
These factors, including the expense of the school but especially the death of her friend, was the flashpoint to Huff joining the military, specifically the Navy. “It was like ‘Well, I’m not doing great in school.’ I wasn’t failing or like flunking out, but I was potentially on the way there. I also didn’t have a passion for teaching, so I felt like I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
Huff also knew that going home wasn’t a good idea. “There’s just not a lot there.” She came home on Christmas break and said to her parents: “I’m going to join the military.” Her parents said: “Just not the Army or the Marines, but go ahead.” Their point being that “they didn’t want me catching bullets for a living.” So Huff joined the Navy and eventually became part of a Seebee unit which, ironically, is mostly all on land.
Huff said she did really well in the military. “I was the youngest and and the fastest. I was like the fastest person at the time to have achieved their expeditionary warfare badge, where you basically have to build a base camp with tents. You draw a layout and then you have to direct people on how to build it.” She says she was told initially: “You can’t do this, like you’re not high enough rank” even though she was teaching her peers who were higher rank than her how to do it.
Huff says the regimented aspect of the military beginning in boot camp really suited her. She does mention “ridiculous tasks” in the initial training period like making a bed, ripping it apart and doing it again, over and over. But the training itself was built within that aspect of repetition. “I think they’re trying to break you down a little bit…plus everybody’s always punished as a whole,” Huff explains. “The point is that it’s no longer you…it’s everyone…and you figure out how to straighten things out within your group fairly quickly, especially when it’s like one person always getting everybody in trouble.” She remembers specifically what were called “ice cream socials” where they would work out, all the windows would be closed and buckets of ice cream would be placed inside the hall, but not for consumption. “You’d just work out until you all made enough condensation by heating up the room enough to melt the ice cream basically.”
Huff was the only person allowed to eat ice cream at her boot camp “because I had the fastest female time ever recorded on their track during a fitness test.” Huff says in the military: “I just chose to hit the ground running, and I wanted to kind of be a sponge and observe and absorb all of everything that I could. I had pretty good leadership skills and I had also just good peers around me.”
Huff was based at the reserve center in Syracuse, New York but also working out of Williamsburg, Virginia. Huff said she had the knack of being able to break down the process of a drill or a project and teach it to others by making it engaging. “For me, if something is very boring and dry and I have to sit still and just pay attention, I don’t learn well that way. I check out. But if it can be, like, actively engaging and kind of hands-on, I’ll most likely absorb it like a sponge.”
Huff says she was pretty fortunate that the guys in her team also were also really grateful and saw she was putting in the time helping them. “And so they looked to my leadership and were like ‘Huffy’s got it. She’s teaching all of us.’” After moving up and forward because of her abilities, Huff was able to get a good group of people and a good command right from the beginning. “That, in part, set me up for success. And a lot of other people didn’t have that. Or a lot of people don’t always get that.” But she kept pushing, because even if it wasn’t in her exact purview, she wanted to be involved, which continued to serve her well.
Huff wasn’t sure if she wanted to make the Navy a career since there was very little flexibility within the structure. “I was missing weddings and birthday parties or even just fun things I wanted to go do,” She attributes that flexibility to productivity especially with her position at MSK. “I can, on a Monday, decide that, like, in two weeks, I’m gonna take off for the weekend and go drive to North Carolina and stay a night and drive back. You have that freedom.” She says that part of the reason she likes working for MSK so much is that there is a work/life balance.
Huff ended up being deployed to the United Arab Emirates. “We were like two hours outside of Dubai, which is basically the desert. There’s nothing out there. Not a single thing. There was a camel farmer that was our neighbor. But other than that, it was just desolate desert.” She says the experience was definitely eye-opening for her personally especially at the base with the host nation. “So it was the UAE military. And then there were 12 of us guys from the Navy. The Australians had a pretty big base within the base. Same thing with the Brits. The Italians were there as well. It was cool,” she explain “One night, the Italians had a real, authentic pizza maker stove sent over from Italy, and they made us all pizza. We also got to work with the Pakistani folks, our host nation, and people from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. You get to see their culture because it’s such a small community.”
The experience did make Huff appreciate America a lot more. ”When I came back, I was never so excited to see real grass in my entire life. But also just how much we as Americans really take for granted.” When she was in the UAE, Huff recollects driving from Dubai to Oman through the desert with her unit. “You pass some of these tiny, tiny villages. And in these tiny villages, it is just like plywood shacks with 15 or 20 people crammed inside. Their bathroom is a dirt hole that’s dug in the floor.” She also reflects in places like Dubai, there is no OSHA (which helps regulate safety), meaning, she explains, people are just on scaffolding, or on the top of the skyscrapers, with no harnesses.
After she left the military, which was a result of frustration, geography and eventually paperwork, Huff began work in Utica with an engineering consulting firm. The work ethic she initially experienced in the military reflected in her new gig. “It was just the hard work,” she explains.
“All of the jobs that I have worked at since, including MSK have been some luck in a sense,” she explains. “Like I don’t have a degree from college and I think people at first are maybe not sure. And then when you interview, they’re like, “Ok, this person does know what they’re talking about. And they have this work ethic. So let’s, let’s try them.”
When she started at Atlantic Testing Laboratories in Utica, Huff says she was the lowest man on the totem pole for that company, testing concrete and soil. “I didn’t really know anything about concrete or soils… not really…as far as the geotechnical or the compaction aspect.” She said the people at the company were simply: “Hey, we need you. Can you do this? Do you want to learn how to do this? Do you want to learn how to test asphalt?” Huff’s response: “Sure.” She says she fell in love with the process of it.
Huff explains that she used to walk behind the pavers, testing to see how compact the asphalt was. She explains that asphalt, and specifically road paving, can be very complex. “The rollers have to be maintaining certain speeds and the drums need to hit between 10 to 12 impacts per minute [optimally]. You can actually see the lines while they’re doing it. But have to know what you’re looking for.”
Huff continues that “you have to have the right amount of aggregate and polymer in your asphalt mixes. Otherwise it does weird things.” She says that the asphalt arrives, on contact, at 315 or 320 degrees. As it is put down, it mixes with the polymers. “And then there’s this sweet spot where all of a sudden you won’t do anything. [The process] will kind of [take over and] push the asphalt so you’re not compacting it anymore. Then you got to wait for it to cool another five degrees before you can compact it. I [definitely liked] methodology of that.” The questions, she says, thereby determined the course of action: “If you’re not achieving the optimal compaction, then it [becomes] ‘What’s going on?’ Is the paver going too fast? Is our mix coming in cold? Is it a problem in the plant? Is there too much liquid asphalt in it? Too many aggregates?”
Huff ended up running the asphalt department for all 10 offices of the company. “It was a lot. I was working 70, 80-hour work weeks in the summer. For a long time, I really, really loved it. And then, when I was salary and wasn’t getting that overtime, I just was like, ‘This is not [for me anymore].’”
For her next work challenge, Huff knew she wanted to be in the mountains somewhere. She was considering Maine, Vermont, Wyoming and Montana, “And I just started applying for jobs. I was actually interviewing for a company in Montana, when MSK reached out for me for an interview. I had sent my resume in late one night. And the next morning, at 8 a.m., they called, and said ‘Can we set up an interview?’ And I was like, “Sure.”
Originally, Huff was hired at MSK Engineers for construction administrative work because of her background with testing soils and concrete. She was also an EPA light inspector in addition to her experience overseeing the 10 different offices for her previous employer. Logistically, she admits, moving to Vermont was easier than out West. “And I had never been to Bennington.” She found an apartment and moved to Southern Vermont.
Catching up with Huff on a Tuesday afternoon, she is doing survey work, a position that she transitioned into which gives her the ability to be in all sorts of different environments. On this day, she was working on a new project at the Bennington Museum with the Total Station machine measuring and creating point labels. This allows the firm to create a bird’s eye view of a parcel with select data points. “We’ll take all of this data that we collected and bring it into CAD (Computer Assisted Design) where it will kind of connect the dots.” Huff’s survey work also reflects the elevation and the measuring of space between say a fence and a sidewalk to give the correct representation of data to the engineers. “So then the designers will see if something goes downhill then back uphill. It’s important [as in this case at the Bennington Museum] if you’re gonna build a ramp to know where the finished floor elevation is just inside the door. [That way] when you build the ramp, you can grade it correctly.”
While the Bennington Museum is more a corporate project, MSK Engineers also does a lot of civil work. They just did the survey of Welling Field in North Bennington. ”We did all of the topographical information and the layout of the field,” Huff explains. “So really it’s just a map with the drive and where the dugouts sit. We give that to our design engineers, and then they’ll do a grading plan with proper drainage.”
MSK also does private work including a lot of septic design. Huff explains: “Our private engineers will go out… and they’ll dig three holes, like eight to 10 feet deep, to see if they hit water or bedrock.” In thick areas of vegetation, they might even use LIDAR but they would prefer to just get the survey data via the Total Station. Like with every industry, there is a pipeline to follow.
“I have embraced it now,” Huff admits. “But I still struggle sometimes.” In the military, when a group was told to go do something, “you just go do it.” In the civilian sector, in her work and some management positions, the approach needs to be one more of independent thinking. “I think if you work at MSK, for the most part, you have to be kind of a independent person. There’s no micromanaging, per se so you just have to take initiative to do the project yourself.”
Huff says she has really found her passion in surveying. “And maybe it’s also, in part, this area, because it’s rural. If I was in a city, where I would constantly have to do projects, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.” Huff adds that she also does a lot of boundary surveying for MSK which can sometimes be on hundreds of acres and take weeks to do. Last summer, she did a boundary survey that was 375 acres. With those kind of projects the surveyor sometimes has to go to the town offices and do deed research. “So sometimes I have to review all of the deeds, and hopefully find enough information from all of them that you can kind of piece together the puzzle that is the parcel.”
Huff says there are times when the information is not available. At that point, they’ll walk the property line and find all of the property pins or monumentation. “Sometimes those can be marble squares or iron rebar or pipes in the ground.” With older properties, some of those landmarks can actually be stone walls. “So there will be a pin at one end of the wall. Then you go 300 feet, and there’ll be another pin.”
The balance of new and old builds and tech keeps Huff on her toes. Right now, her current goal is to take her Field Survey [FS] test perhaps this winter. “So that is the field survey kind of certification. So in engineering, in any form of engineering, you have your engineers in training, and then you have your professional engineers. So in engineering, you have to take what’s called an FE [Field Engineer]. And that is, like a step that a lot of people take right after college.” FS is the first step for Huff progressing forward in her surveying career. The next would be her LS [Licensed Survey]. The FS though, Huff says, is a lot of studying. “I’m reteaching myself calculus, like on YouTube.” She says there is no time crunch but that she tries to put an hour aside to study every day when she can.
Huff says she just tries to always be better at what she does. “And I want to be a better person…a better human to other people. I want to be better in my career. I just want to be better all the way around.”
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