On this episode of Dear Corner Office, host Michele Heyward sits down with Ciprianna Patterson, a civil engineer turned executive at Toole Design, to talk about what it really takes to build a career on your own terms. Ciprianna traces her path from a college coin flip that landed her in civil engineering, through five formative years at a small Baltimore firm, over a decade in public sector traffic engineering with Prince George's County, and into an executive role she landed not through a job posting, but through a phone call from someone who already knew her work.

The conversation digs into the real mechanics of career growth that rarely make it into a bio: how moving between public and private sector work builds credibility on both sides, why an executive MBA became necessary once technical skill wasn't enough for the business side of leadership, and how networking looked completely different before social media, built on in person relationships and reputation rather than online connections. Ciprianna and Michele also get candid about negotiation, pay equity, and why understanding your total compensation, not just your salary, matters over the course of a 40 year career, especially for women and women of color who are so often underpaid from the start.

Ciprianna closes with a simple but powerful idea: your journey doesn't have to be a straight line or fit into a tidy narrative. It can be patchwork, made up of everything you've tried, kept, and let go. The goal isn't to explain it to everyone else. It's to own it.