Honored alumnus encourages students to 'Build it strong'

October 2008

The auditorium of the Joseph Smith Building was filled to overflowing on Thursday, Oct. 9, as Honored Alumnus Douglas C. Welling presented a lecture to nearly 1,000 receptive engineering and technology students.

Welling, the president and COO of Jacobsen Construction, was recently named this year's Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology's Honored Alumnus. His lecture, entitled "Build it strong, boys. Build it strong!"  encouraged students to not only build strong projects, but to build strong principles and strong partnerships. He focused on the great need for collaboration in the engineering field and encouraged students to develop those skills now and not have to struggle with them later.

“As you have the opportunity to learn teamwork here at BYU, jump in – take it for all it’s worth,” he said.

Welling showed a graphic representation of all the parties involved in a typical major construction engineering project –literally hundreds of suppliers, contractors, engineers, architects and clients whose cooperation is essential to a project’s success.

“I think he really demonstrated how teamwork is vital to the overall performance of a project,” said Brandon Weight, a junior from Spanish Fork studying civil engineering.

Fellow civil engineering student Ryan Bessing, of San Diego, Calif., was also amazed by the number of people who would be involved in a project.

“I guess I need to go make friends with all the people working in other majors,” Bessing quipped, “because it looks like I’ll end up working with most of them.”

Welling stressed that engineering is an action word and that involves not just theory and principles but application, setting out to take on and then tackle a problem.

He told the account of early pioneers in Salt Lake City tasked with building the LDS Tabernacle. (Welling’s firm recently completed a multi-million dollar renovation of the Tabernacle, so he is intimately familiar with the engineering challenges of that building).  He told of the early Saints, with very limited resources and nothing more than a cursory knowledge of engineering setting out to accomplish something great. They had their task, and they had their challenges but they built it strong.

He left the students with a challenge to do the same – to face the challenges and to make a difference.

“Engineering is problem solving,” he said. “What problem can you help solve?”

Writer: Nathan Casper

College News
October 2009

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• Civil engineering professor honored as ITE Outstanding Transportation Educator
• BYU engineering project leads to sustainable structures for Mozambicans
• Graduation Information