Title: From Civil Engineering to City Hall: Abena Sackey Ojetayo ‘07, ‘09

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[00:00:10,070] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University.

[00:00:18,045] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum where we will
host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you.

[00:00:34,900] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome. We are here today with Abena Ojetayo who is a Cornell graduate with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a focus on sustainability and infrastructure, a master's degree in engineering management, and she's now a local government executive in Tallahassee, Florida. Her work is at the intersection of sustainability, equity, and community-building, and we are eager to hear more.

[00:01:01,565] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Thank you so much for having me, Christa.

[00:01:02,809] CHRISTA DOWNEY: It's a pleasure.

[00:01:04,369] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, I get to start today's questioning. We wanted to know currently, because we were very intrigued about the crossover that you've experienced in your career, what you're doing at your current work, and how it relates to the degrees that you got at Cornell?

[00:01:19,775] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Well, I'd never would have imagined it if you told me I would be here years ago, I probably wouldn't believe you. I work in local government
as Christa mentioned, and I'm an Assistant City Manager currently, and previously a director. But I started in local government as the Chief Resilience Officer, which is more familiar to me. As a Chief Resilience Officer for a city, you are working with the leadership, multiple stakeholders, both internal to the organization and in the broader community, to develop a strategy for how the community would deal with disruption, with shocks and stressors. And everything from root causes for those disruptions and future mitigation or adaptation to what the new normal will be. And that's a relatively new field, the Chief Resilience Officer. But it is a close cousin of sustainability officers, sustainability managers. That's some of the work that I did. I've always been interested in that work as an engineer. And so I sort of meandered through multiple sectors, but still kind of weaving through this idea of how do we take care of what we have right now? How do we behave and live as good stewards of our resources?
While also looking to the future concerning what might be coming down the line that could shake up everything that we know. A lot of that in sustainability work centers around the natural environment and climate. Climate change, climate adaptation, and climate mitigation. So resilience, along that line of thinking, focuses more on that disruption, the disaster part of it,
and how eminent it may be. And it informs or tries to inform how we organize ourselves, how we build cities, how we develop programs, how we address systemic issues so that we can really be better prepared for the future and then all the people in our communities can thrive.
So that's how we weave together sustainability, equity, and community in this work. And like I said, I've always been really interested in it. That's what led me to engineering, this idea of building better communities. And that's what led me specifically to civil engineering. Because that's, I think out of all the fields, the one that really gets you into the building of society at a scale that you can observe in the day-to-day life that was very, very attractive to me from a long, long time, early age. And Cornell nurtured that, allowed me to get into unlikely paths, I think, with some independent studies and bringing together pieces that didn't always connect. And I think that set me up for the kind of work I'm doing now, which doesn't always connect, but I make it connect whenever I need to. So that's sort of the short end of it. I think we can probably dig into it a little bit more before I keep rambling.

[00:04:31,040] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So what does that look like on a daily or weekly or monthly basis? What are the things that are on your to-do list or what are the projects you've worked on recently?

[00:04:40,909] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: So let me say on the Resilience Officer role, which I no longer wear that hat exclusively, but is still very much part of my work. It began a lot from thinking about worst-case scenarios and sort of doomsday predictions. And as much as that sounds depressing I found that to be really an important place to begin. I always say it's helpful for everyone to appreciate the good news once you understand the bad. And that's sort of a compass for me as a Christian as well. That, you know, the gospel means good news. And good news is not really good news unless you know why your circumstances are bad or what's really horrible about this world. So understanding, even in climate adaptation work, understanding what is the worst-case scenario often can ground us into knowing that that's not what we want. If we can all agree on that, it helps us to ask questions about who's vulnerable, who's most vulnerable and at-risk, and shift our gaze towards them. And then it sort of inspires us to get to work. There's something about the urgency of a crisis that really spurs us on, and that really brings people together in new ways. I find that it's a helpful place to operate out of, thinking about worst-case scenarios, thinking about doomsday, thinking about who is at risk, But it's also very hopeful for me. It is very much a work of hope in our ability to build better communities, better context for multiple people from all walks of life to be able to thrive. That's the kind of hope that you'd need for this work. And I think even as engineers, you have to approach every problem with the expectation that there is a solution. We don't really enjoy
impossible things. That's probably like the applied physics folks. I never understood that major.
But with engineering, I always felt like there was an answer. There's a solution, and at least you could design it. And so that's a very hopeful place for me to work and operate out of. So on a day to day, my work can range from working with multiple departments to develop our clean energy future. Our city right now is transitioning to 100% net renewable energy. And so building the pieces, planning the pieces for our utility conversion and transition is a big part. Our city operates our own utility, electric utility, our gas, and our water and wastewater, all of those pieces. So we actually have everything in-house to be able to make a bold declaration like that, and actually do it. And converting all of our fleet to electric. We set that target for our mass transit system as well as all of the fleet for the city government. And that's also within our power and our ability. So real-time working through something like that. But it could also be facilitating a mental health crisis response unit. Because part of the work we did with resilience planning has led us to adverse community experiences, adverse childhood experiences as root causes of the kind of trauma that gets worse over time and that lead to these huge disruptions within public safety. And so that was clearly another element that we knew we had to work on and address it creatively. With social workers, with law enforcement, with human service providers all together responding to a 911 emergency. It's just the wide gamut and I love it because it's never really the same. There are a lot of unlikely partners that I get to work with,
which is really encouraging. But my role as an executive is to bring the teams together, to lead with the strategic planning, and to identify and secure resources to empower them to do the work. That's really a blessing. I mean, I get to do that. We get to think of crazy ideas and see the shocked faces when we say, yeah, this is what we're going to do. And then come alongside them and say, yes, we're going to find the resources we're going to do it. It's going to take us some time, but we're going to get into the meaty part of this work and it's incredibly rewarding.

[00:09:07,400] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I'm so fascinated by this intersection that you're at. In the past I have worked with the UN disaster management folks. But I so appreciate that arc over to resilience planning versus disaster management. I know both of them have to be there, right? But I appreciate your framing of, or re-framing, the Resilience Planning and then what you're doing now, bringing in as an engineer, part of the problem is mental health in our communities. It's a stunning connection and I appreciate so much that wider lens that you're talking about with bringing all those teams together.

[00:09:49,165] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Yeah, I've been really encouraged by even our federal and state government sort of waking up to the need for mitigation and addressing issues before it becomes a crisis. We have spent a lot of energy and resources on emergency response. And it's costly, not just in lives and property, but in time. And I know several years ago, FEMA published their study and their findings that for every dollar we spend on mitigation, we actually save six in emergency response and recovery. And so it just makes economic sense to do the work beforehand, but also to look ahead as to what the community needs rather than to wait for disaster. With that said though, I've mentioned earlier, disasters unleash the creativity that really is required to match the severity of the situation, so I think as our community has faced multiple crises and shocks, whether it's from racial unrest, unjust policing systems, hurricanes. Our community has experienced a category five hurricane that they've just never seen before. All of that sort of causes you to think, okay, what else can we do? What have we not seen or thought about before? And it widens the lens, Tracy, as you mentioned, so that we can't move forward with business as usual anymore. And that's a gift to us.

[00:11:16,309] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Your framing is always just so generous. I absolutely love that. And I appreciate everything that you've got there in that regard.

[00:11:26,494] CHRISTA DOWNEY: My gosh, I also am just so inspired by this work. These are such important issues and I love that the city is working on this. I'm so curious, do you know, is this common across the country, are there positions like this?

[00:11:41,929] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: It's not as common as we would like. So Chief Resilience Officers began trending, I would say maybe five years ago, five or six years ago. And it was encouraged by several large philanthropic groups like the Rockefeller Foundation that sort of incentivized it. But even then, it was about 100 across the entire world. I mean, we're talking thousands of cities, right? So this is not bread and butter type of work. So our city took a leap early on to create this position and it really came at the heels of experiencing a relatively devastating hurricane for us. And it was barely a category one. I say that in Florida because, you know, bring it on category four we’re out there barbecuing, but a category one, and it took us out. And there are some unique factors in our community that made it particularly devastating. One is that we hadn't experienced a strong tropical storm like that in probably 20, almost 30 years. So our emergency response in that area was just really weak and dusty. We also have a huge urban forest, which is our pride. We are Tree City, USA. Multiple years. We love our urban canopy, but our utility is also above ground, about 50%. And so when a wind blows or squirrel goes across the line, we have a power outage. And so that category one really took out a significant chunk of our electric infrastructure and it took a long time to get to be restored. People were just reeling, they were upset. And we knew we had to do something. But rather than just reactively rebuild better as we like to do after or rebuild again after a disaster. They said, well, let's, let's kind of think about this a little bit let’s be comprehensive. We've also had public safety as a number one concern for many years. Our law enforcement is actually quite advanced and award winning in their community-oriented policing. When public safety issues sort of started bubbling up and becoming a national issue our community was, yet again, under pressure to make sure we rise to the occasion. And so a lot of conversations were intermingled and that's just how it is that at a local level and at a community level, it's hard to talk about any one issue in isolation. Everything just sort of bleeds together. So in my work I realized early on I could not talk about just one thing. Before we got to the heart of the matter of building hardening and climate adaptation, we had to deal with people's present-day crises of poverty, persistent poverty, of housing and affordability. All those things are real crises, real disasters every day for people. If they can't weather that, how much more can they weather something that's 20 to 30 years in their minds away. So that's what led to that. And I think more communities, more cities are faced with that and they're reckoning with that and so I hear way more than I used to about communities doing Resilience Planning, similar to doing climate adaptation plans or even sustainability plans like was some of the work I did when I was working at Cornell. Universities have really been a leader in that space. But now, I think the clear leaders are in local government because they are the government closest to the people. We could talk about it at a meta level, at the federal level, but the rubber meets the road in your neighborhood and in your streets. And local government has really stepped up to the plate to meet the needs and it's less contentious than you would imagine at the local level. I mean people just, you know each other, first of all, we're going to the grocery store together and you know how I feel about you. But also, the effect of what's happening is tangible. We can just point to it, we can look to it. We can talk about it in real terms, not just in some philosophical what's happening as sea levels rise in Miami. It's what's happening when a storm comes through Tallahassee. And how do we feel about what the response and the preparation is for that, a totally different starting point and kind of a different mood when you start talking about it at the local level. So it's becoming more and more common, luckily, and I think communities are demanding a lot more from local governments. And that is spurring local government to rise to the occasion as they always have to kind of innovate.

[00:16:27,769] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I'm curious about the innovations around housing and poverty and taking care of the city's most vulnerable, those equity issues and how that intersects
with your work. Can you give us an example?

[00:16:42,800] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Sure. So I would say that the sort of game changer ideas that came out of our resilience planning effort was around adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care, affordable housing, public safety, as it relates to sort of shock events in communities and sort of how they bounce back from that. And of course, the climate adaptation related to weather disasters. But affordable housing rose to the top because it is a chronic stressor. It has just been something that is slowly eroding away the fabric of neighborhoods, of communities, of individual households. When so much of someone's income is spent just maintaining a roof over their heads it leaves very little room for anything else. But also, it's a problem that's been decades in the making across the country. I mean, every community is having this issue where we just have not as a community, as a country, built enough units, not enough units that are affordable to working households. So the inventory is desperately low and incomes have been stagnant or not rising to the same level as inflation and other expenses happening. So it was just a perfect storm. In our community, a lot of that conversation, because our local government actually is very involved in so many different service areas, there's a lot of looking to our local government for solutions, but it is so complex and requires so many partners. And so the innovation that we've tried, so after I did the resilience plan and these issues sort of bubbled up, I was like, okay, and I was told, hey, you go work on that. So I went from doing resilience planning to directing the sustainability department, taking on code enforcement, which is actually one of the original functions of local government, which is focused on the built environment and how we preserve it through codes, hazard mitigation, etc. I would not have expected it but once I got it, I was like, oh, this is perfect. And I changed all my code enforcement officers to be Resilience Officers to really shift their perspective, not just in policing people's sort of small issues on their property, but really think about it as a tool for hazard mitigation and community revitalization. But that got us into this affordable housing issue, right? People that are aging in place that can’t afford to continue to preserve their units or people who can't afford better, so they're living in really slum conditions. Or just the mix of units not being diverse enough to meet the various kinds of families. So in our region, we have multi-family rentals, and then we have single-family homes and not really much in-between. And that's part of the challenge because our community is so diverse. We have families, we've got elderly folks that just need an accessory dwelling unit, you have young professionals that have kids that want a town home. So we knew one innovation we needed to push is more missing middle housing to increase the diversity of options and to make better use of the land that we do have to add density where it makes sense, but to do it at a scale that honors existing neighborhoods rather than a harsh 15-story apartment right next door to a single-family home. So we've been looking at that, we've been exploring those, we've actually done some work where we invited architects to give us sample designs and take it all the way to a permit-ready document to make it easy for developers to enter into that work. A lot of revolving loans that we give to small developers so that locally they can participate in that revitalization and we can keep some of the financing local. And then also leveraging as much as we can. We found that our local government can't afford to build multiple units. That's not really our functional area. We have a housing authority that does public housing, but the majority of new construction is done by private developers. And so we've had to be creative with leveraging some of our resources to meet them, to incentivize certain types of units while they're building whatever else they want to do. We've implemented something called inclusionary housing, an ordinance that requires that every developer, past a certain number of units, reserve a portion of their units to be affordable for low-income families. In exchange, we have some development incentives, some permitting and land-use flexibilities that we grant them, which is really important for developers. So there are some unique ways that local government can intervene or incentivize that's far beyond just actually constructing the units themselves. We found that the development services, the incentives, the zoning, those things, the regulatory aspects that are within our control really can help developers overcome any barriers and encourage. So we went from, just to give you an example of the success over the last few years, we had probably in the 50 years prior, maybe 4,600 to 5,000 units that are certified as affordable housing income constrained in our entire inventory. It's abysmally low, right? But in the last few years, just putting together a mix of strategies and being really focused on this issue and calling out for more partners to come along with us, we've added 2,300 units that are in the development pipeline. That's more than we've ever had in the past 25 years combined. Because we just, like I said, we're not building units. We're not incentivizing it, we're not pushing for it. And so we found a lot of success there. We have to keep pushing because we're so far behind. There's still a lot of work to do.

[00:22:50,734] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Wow.

[00:22:51,694] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I really appreciate, again, just everything that you're saying that comes together. This is not just civil engineering build a bridge, build a high rise of some sort. The entirety of the vision that you have there. And I was really intrigued we were going to ask you about your most important collaborators and the grand challenges for the future, but you've already outlined those for us. As you were doing that, I became really interested in how, you, at the head of this, are managing all of these very different teams to come together towards this vision. So, as an engineer, we often work in teams. So I would love to hear your perspective about how to manage all these moving parts and all these different teams.

[00:23:44,555] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Yeah. That's a great question. So I do think it begins with some kind of grounding or moral compass for the leader to just sort of know which way is north. And to be fully convinced of that in order to bring along other people. For me, that is my faith. It is my belief that we live in a world that has been lovingly created by a generous god who has charged us to be good stewards of it. But also to love our neighbor as ourselves. Which means I’ve got to go out of my way to find ways to help them thrive. So I find it really a privilege, the work that I do, is, every day I'm like, I get to do this. Because it's not something that I think everyone is lucky enough to be engaged in. And I need to bring that enthusiasm to my teams. Because if we don't have that, we are easily burnt out with this sort of doomsday hopeless outlook. So I think that's the number one beginning point for me. But I think also calling people to a task is incredibly powerful. Y'all didn't know you were going to church, right? But that's a leadership lesson I learned from Jesus. I mean, he just, he calls you, he looks at you and he says, I want you to be part of this ridiculous plan. When I finished my masters, I got an email from somebody that there's a millionaire in Nigeria, who's from the tech world. And he's constantly done this work in his community and they have entrusted him with building a city in East Nigeria. I'm thinking this is a scam, right? But part of me said, this is intriguing. How many people are building a new city from scratch? And at that time I was single, unattached, well I was in a relationship with my now husband, but no kids, just graduated, I thought this is the best time, if any, to take a wild adventure back in Nigeria. And it was just as wild as it was. I mean, this guy was like, yeah, they've given me all this land in the community. They want a new city, preferably New York style, right? I'm like, no, we're not doing that. This is a flood prone agricultural community in East Nigeria, but we can come up with something really creative. And we just worked at it. It was three of us that he called and said, I want you based on your credentials and all this stuff, I want you to join me on this wild adventure. And that really has a powerful impact on people to just say, I've been called to this task. And so I find that also really important in working with teams to seek people out and to call them specifically to the task. And not just sort of put a vision out there and look for whoever sort of gathers around you. And then I also found it really helpful for my success to enter into people's worlds and their spaces and to know what's important to them. And frame with my issue my work in a way that's relevant for them and not just require them to adopt my frame of thinking. So I try to do that, for example, with our IT director, to enter into his world and speak about resilience as it relates to network redundancy and cybersecurity and how we use artificial intelligence to predict what the future disruptions will be like. That got them excited, right? And we went on a conference together and we started speaking about this work and he's a champion for resilience. Same thing with our law enforcement, right, to enter into this challenge we have with people cycling through the system when it's clear that it's a mental health crisis and not a criminal activity. And so they become the champions. So those are, to me, so critical for any kind of teamwork. To inspire around a vision and to enter into their world and to call them specific to it. If we can finish this work and it ends with people saying, oh, we did this thing, or I'm doing this resilience work and I can just sort of fade in the background, oh man, that's success. So we get to do that now with all these different teams. I love the challenge of making it make sense for somebody who doesn't do this work every day. And to sort of walk away with them feeling like, yeah, this is, this is my charge. I'm like, yes, excellent, excellent, wonderful.

[00:28:05,030] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I love that framing of leadership and bringing people in. Wow, so we need to wrap up this part of our conversation. I feel privileged to have you here, to have this conversation and just to know that there are people like you out there who are brilliant, who are passionate about the work, and who are caring about these issues and going out and making, like you said, a very tangible impact in their local communities. And I'm sure that spreads. So thank you so much for this. We're going to bring you back and chat about how you got where you are a little bit more of your Cornell background, but thank you so much for being here.

[00:28:54,935] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Absolutely. I love talking with people about my work and so it is really my privilege. And thank you for the opportunity to do this.

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[00:29:04,610] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome back. Abena, thank you so much for our last conversation. As we said, we're all ready to jump ship and come work for you. You're an inspiring leader. So we want to hear more about how you got there. So I'll let Traci begin with the questions. Thank you.

[00:29:24,920] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: We were wondering how you chose engineering as a career path. You mentioned that you'd thought about it since you were little. And then what brought you to Cornell specifically?

[00:29:34,729] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: I don't even remember how young I was when I started thinking about engineering, but I think problem-solving was always intriguing. Now, in high school and middle school, I was good at math. And so our poor high school counselors managing 3,000 students, are like, you like math, think about engineering. Okay. My father always encouraged. My mom is also an accountant and so just math and science was fun in the house. They made it fun and they made it interesting. And they always encouraged me even as a girl, to pursue it. So I think just the encouragement from others led me to it because I wanted to do something with my hands and do something with problem-solving. When it came to colleges, I looked all over the place, went to a couple of hostings. But honestly the day I received my big red book, advertising and promoting Cornell, I was sold. They just had me, they had me. My favorite color was red, the pictures, everybody looks so happy on the slope. People just schlepping along on the hill and the waterfalls. I was like this is heaven on earth, right? And I was lucky enough to be invited to a hosting program in the fall. It actually was gray and rainy the whole time. But my hostess was awesome. Cornell just spoiled us that weekend, as they do, and made a great impression. And so I think I may have mailed one other college application. And when it was all said and done, Cornell is just like my choice and I wasn't looking back and I still don't regret it. I really loved the many options that were there. So that even though I wanted to study engineering, I could still enjoy architecture courses, urban planning courses, wine courses, you know?

[00:31:32,539] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: The famous wine course, right? You get to take it. I wish I could take it.

[00:31:41,284] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I am curious to hear which courses had made a particular impact on you, or which clubs and activities, what are the things you did as an undergraduate that were really leading you to this path?

[00:31:55,580] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Yeah. Too many undergraduate groups. I remember National Society of Black Engineers was just a really awesome safe space, a place where we could all, you know, pat each other on the back and also mourn bad exams and all that sort of stuff. We traveled together and got to meet other professional engineers around the country. And it just was, it was just awesome. I co-founded a group called now I think it's called Cornell's Pan-African. So they changed the name. They didn't even ask me. I'm going to ask me and they changed the name, but it was the Coalition of Pan-African Scholars back in the day, and just connecting some of the work in justice and equity and redevelopment in the US, but with African countries and African communities around the world that really faced similar issues. And our Christian community, I was singing, I was in a gospel choir, I was in a Bible study. I mean, all of that just actually buffered me against the treacherous engineering courses so that I can have a little bit of an outlet and that just be buried in it. I really, in hindsight, it was just so valuable to have the rigorous coursework, but to also have community completely outside of engineering to really help me frame the work that I'm doing now.

[00:33:16,519] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I have to say so many of my engineering students are very much involved in music, in dance, marching band, theater. They have whole separate lives. They need that for their sanity.

[00:33:32,530] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: I did some of the engineering stuff. I did Solar Decathlon, that was awesome. And actually one of my favorite engineering classes I want to say it was Professor Rayburn that taught it, but maybe not. It was an Infrastructure course in our and I remember our capstone was a SimCity project. And Sim City was my favorite game at the time. He said that I was like, Oh yeah, I'm nailing it. That was really fun.

[00:34:00,830] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I really love that. Once you got past your schooling, so to speak, your formal schooling, when you first entered the job market, what was the one thing that you wish you had more of from your school experience?

[00:34:16,565] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: I think it's changed a little bit. So my first official full-time job was actually working at Cornell Diversity Programs in Engineering as an academic advisor. I was like, what am I doing here? This doesn't make any sense. I should be in a cubicle somewhere drawing designs, but my mentor at the time, Dynetta Jones, she's no longer there, I think she's at MIT still, convinced me to do it because while I was working there is when I finished my master's degree. So out of undergrad, I worked recruiting students, advising them, helping them to navigate the engineering program. And it was incredibly rewarding. But then I worked in other civil engineering construction related work and I lamented not having some of the basics of construction. Don't hate me when I say this, but I felt like going through an engineering degree, you get, more leadership and strategy and big picture, challenging questions. It's an elite education, I'm trying to find the right way to say this, but it's different than what you might get at a trade school where you're like literally learning the hands-on how to make this work. I think in the beginning I lamented not having enough of that. But over time, my Cornell education has served me so well because I do think that we're training leaders in the field. You're training changemakers and tastemakers even in the non-technical world. And so when you are armed with that and you're starting early in your career, it could feel like you don't know the basics, but you actually have so much more to offer. And I think that's part of what has helped me move quickly through multiple sectors and find success either way. I don't know that there's anything right now that I wish I had more of. I loved the opportunity to have had flexibility in my degree program. I had an academic advisor that supported it. So I could mix in urban planning courses with civil engineering. I love that I was able to travel abroad, which was harder to do for engineers back then. I think we used to have two options, either an English-speaking place or Germany, because who wants to do calculus in another language. But I was able to go to Greece and work on an infrastructure sort of urban planning project too. And it is probably a gamble, honestly, in hindsight, I think the advisors were probably thinking, I don't know, You could try it, but good luck. And it worked out. I really cherish that about Cornell. It just kind of allowed me to experiment a little bit and still have the really solid foundation to utilize for any other career.

[00:37:07,654] CHRISTA DOWNEY: You said you did some academic advising and I remember we worked together then. I'm thinking now about current sophomores. What might you advise them to consider as they explore career options?

[00:37:22,280] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: I would invite them to go across campus and take another course outside of their college. It's a little intimidating, and not just the easy fufu courses by the way, right? Because sometimes you need that one as a mental break, but really try something that is not normal. I remember taking an Organizational Behavior course in ILR and I was cynical. I'll be honest, I walked in there thinking this is not a real rigorous course of study here. What is this social engineering kind of thing? But I loved it. And the professor was an expert in her field and she gave us material that challenged us. And it was just different than the way I was thinking about some of the work. So even that was instructive. So I would advise students now always throw in one unlikely course that might help shape you. But I think overall as you think about careers it's so daunting to think, what do I want to be when I grow up? And it's not, It's never that. There's so many people I know they just don't have a career at all related to are mapped out the way they did when they  But it is a lot about finding an expertise that will bring value to the community and being open to bringing that forth in any context. It doesn't have to be your traditional context, right? It can be whatever it is, whatever sector. But being an expert, being a subject matter expert matters. It's really important now I think because in the world of social media and everybody having almost an equal platform for knowledge, it is tempting to think that you're an expert just because you have a platform. Just because you can tweet it and it can go viral, doesn't mean you're an expert. And we really need to return back to the value of expertise. Not just to say you're an expert, but to really call out innovation, to tease it out, to do something creative. Like a pianist, they practice all day and they're expert at it, but that's what frees them to be innovative, to be creative, because they are actually really good at playing. Not because they just sat there and made up something in their mind. So I'd encourage deep expertise, but the openness to apply that in any sector.

[00:39:33,319] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: While you were talking about taking one thing each semester, that is out of the norm, I encourage my students to do the same, like ice skating, you need pottery, you need something. But that takes us to our next question where we were going to ask a few fun questions. The first one, what do you do? What do you do to balance out your day to relax or have fun and re-energize?

[00:39:58,879] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: So okay. Well, for the last couple of years, I've been a recovering workaholic and my family has been practicing really deep Sabbath rest, which is just to take one day where we do nothing but just rest and veg out, right? So for us it's Friday night to Saturday, we come, we eat pizza, we eat cookies, we watch a movie, we lay on the couch, rub your belly button, whatever it is, we literally do nothing for about 24 hours. And it is so rejuvenating. I look forward to it all week. And it makes Monday so much more enjoyable. So deep rest has become very important to me. I picked up gardening like just before the pandemic and during, and you know, the pandemic has made us all into crazy weird habits and hobbies that we didn't think we had right? But I picked up gardening and it was so awesome. It was so awesome. It's hard because the things don't just come out of the ground like in the pictures. You put things in the ground and they don't come up for years until you walk by one day and you just see it sprouting up and it still is a joy. This discovery you're like, oh, that was my seed. So I found that really actually grounding in helpful ways when the world feels chaotic to go outside and look at life being life, seasons going around like it does, and plants coming up and plants dying and squirrels chasing other squirrels, and they don't have anything to worry about. So why should I?

[00:41:39,070] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: My squirrels have replanted my raspberry bushes quite often. They're growing all over the place now.

[00:41:44,764] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Honestly, I hate squirrels. I really do. They are like second to mosquitoes. If I could get rid of mosquitoes, I'd do that.

[00:41:53,210] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So what's one place you go for information to stay current in your work?

[00:42:00,004] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: To the streets. I kind of lurk on Facebook, I'm not really active there, but I do find it instructive to know kind of various voices in our community and I make it a point to try to get out of echo chambers. So eclectic friends help me with information about what's on my community's mind. I do like reading now. So I would have never admitted this as an engineer, but I just did not like reading, especially long books. But again, over the last couple of years, I've really come to enjoy reading a good physical copy of a book and just disappearing into that and learning more about how the world works and just gleaning some wisdom from that. So those are kinda sources of general information.

[00:42:48,100] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And then we're going to wind up with this last question, which is, if you were not doing this work, what you're doing right now, what would you do?

[00:42:56,314] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Okay, I would be a farmer, but it also has to make six figures and I have to not work as much with my hands. Is that Is that possible? I love the idea of growing food and yeah, just but it has to make a lot of money. And I can't work this hard. I'd probably need some helpers.

[00:43:18,485] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Fair enough. Well, thank you so much for spending some of your precious time with us. And I feel very inspired. Even just about the whole resilience planning. I like that framework so much. I'm probably going to walk around with that for days. So thank you for all of that and the generosity of spirit that you bring to your engineering, your planning work, your work with your teams. I couldn't think of a better conversation I wanted to have today, so thank you for that.

[00:43:51,560] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: Thank you. Thank you so much. That's really sweet and I'm blessed by it. So you all have done me a great favor and given me a gift as well. Thank you. I hope that you have really wonderful conversations with your other guests. I'm looking forward to hearing more about what my colleagues are doing around the world.

[00:44:10,309] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Excellent, look forward to it as well. Thank you so much. This is wonderful conversation, this is inspiring work.

[00:44:17,315] ABENA SACKEY OJETAYO: No squirrels or mosquitoes were harmed in the recording of this podcast, though I thought long and hard about it.

[00:44:25,870] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Join us for the next episode where we'll be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable and more sustainable world.

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