An engineering degree prepares you to solve technical problems, but a thirty-year career will demand much more. Drawing on a career that has moved from the classroom to engineering, technology, management, and ultimately executive leadership of a major municipal Public Works department, Matt Loesch will share ten lessons for building a career capable of adapting to opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities that are difficult to predict at graduation. Through stories from projects, successes, failures, and unexpected career turns, the discussion will explore not only technical development, but also communication, relationships, judgment, curiosity, leadership, resilience, and the ability to work effectively with people whose perspectives and expertise differ from your own.
Matt Loesch,
Public Works for the City of San José, California
The presentation will invite students to think beyond the first few years of their careers and consider how seemingly small choices, experiences, relationships, and skills can compound over time. Some investments prove useful immediately, while others may not reveal their value until years later, when an unexpected opportunity or challenge calls on something developed long before. By looking thirty years down the road from where students are today, Matt will explore how intentionally building breadth, staying open to unfamiliar experiences, and continuing to develop both technical and human skills can create a career with greater range, resilience, and impact.
Real-world bridge engineering applications — real-time rainfall demands from NOAA records, true structural loads from billions of Weigh-in-Motion truck passages, refined collision risk from Coast Guard transponder data — demonstrate how the same approach informs both local design and regional decision making. The through-line is a changing professional identity: engineers as domain experts and system architects at once, with technology amplifying judgment rather than substituting for it.
Matt Loesch, P.E., a 1995 graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a B.S. in Civil Engineering, is the Director of Public Works for the City of San José, California. A licensed Civil Engineer, he has served the City since 2001 in engineering, technical, management, and executive roles spanning infrastructure, surveying, development services, technology, capital project delivery, and emergency response. His career has focused on the intersection of engineering, technology, organizational systems, and public service, including modernization of San José’s spatial data systems and leadership of complex infrastructure and operational programs. Before beginning his engineering career, Matt spent six years teaching mathematics and science in Oakland first as part of Holy Cross Associates, an experience that continues to influence his approach to leadership, communication, and developing the next generation of engineers.