Marsha Anderson Bomar, Ph.D. has never followed a straight line. In this episode, she sits down with Michele to talk about starting her first company six weeks after having her third child, building a tech data collection firm before the internet existed, selling to a Fortune-listed company on her own terms, and eventually becoming the 8th woman president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. If you've ever thought your engineering degree locked you into one path, this conversation is for you.

Someone inside Marcia Geldert-Murphy, P.E.'s own political party told her to stop mentioning she was a civil engineer and that it had nothing to do with legislating. She stopped cold in her tracks.

In this episode, the former ASCE president and Illinois Senate candidate joins Michele to talk about why that moment perfectly illustrates the problem: the people who understand how infrastructure actually gets built aren't in the room when the money gets decided.

They cover the gap between input and output that lawmakers don't see, why we stopped thinking like an engineering-minded country, and what it's going to take to fix it before the next generation inherits a system that was already past its service life when we inherited it.

Jean Malafrante went to Mexico in college to build schools, and couldn't drink the water. That moment launched a 20+ year career in environmental engineering, a managing director role she never planned for, and eventually a consulting firm she built from a single contract in her first 60 days.

She joins Michele to talk about asking for the work nobody else wanted, learning the business before she needed it, and why the engineers who will lead the next generation aren't the ones solving the technical problem; they're the ones who understand the people in the room.